North Carolina State University

wireless synchronized slideshow with markup

 

Sriram Rajamanohar

Viraj Datar

 

Overview:

 

What is Pebbles?

“The Pebbles project is exploring how handheld devices, such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) including devices running PalmOS or Pocket PCs, and mobile phones, can be used when they are communicating with a "regular" personal computer (PC), with other handhelds, and with computerized appliances such as telephones, radios, microwave ovens, automobiles, and factory equipment.”  [From Pebbles Website].

 

What are we doing?

We are hoping to build on this project to make it more viable for use as a Teaching Aid with respect to Classroom Presentations and facilitate greater interaction between the students and between the student and the Instructor.

 

Goals:

 

We are adding to the existing Remote Commander framework, to make it more viable as a interactive presentation tool. The existing framework works more as a remote input device. We want to make it a interaction tool, allowing lesser control of the PDA over the PC.

 

Problem Description:

 

The Pebbles project has been built as a tool to make the PDA act as a remote input device and to transmit to the PC, inputs from the stylus. The PC reads these messages and uses them to mimic inputs from the keyboard or the mouse. We can use this to have multiple inputs especially during presentations.

 

We would like to make this a specialized classroom teaching aid. With Remote Commander, we have a system that allows complete control over the PC’s inputs. This will not be desirable when the presenter happens to be an instructor using his personal machine. We would want to limit the control the PDA has over PC. For example, we might want to allow PDA to navigate through the slides, allow markup on the screen and perhaps be able to give text inputs only. This project hopes to implement a few of these functionalities.

 

 

Plan of Action:

 

We have set up the following milestones towards our goal

 

Milestone 1: Get to know the Pebbles framework and the Windows CE API, be able to compile and deploy the Remote Commander on the HP iPaq.

 

Milestone 2: Build a more User-friendly menu on the PC side to be able to control the inking from the PC, without the owner of the ink having to erase it.

 

Milestone 3: Reduce functionality on the both Windows CE and the PC environment to allow lesser control over the PC when the session is in progress.

 

Milestone 4: Increase the functionality of the Project to extend to multiple PDAs – Allow inking from multiple PDAs, allow ink erasure from multiple PDAs, enable all connected remote devices to view a consistent view of the screen.

 

References:

 

[1] Microsoft Developer Network - http://msdn.microsoft.com/

 

[2] The CMU Pebbles Project  - http://www.pebbles.hcii.cmu.edu/index.php

 

[3] Programming Microsoft Windows CE – Douglas Boling

 

[4] Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 Programmer's Guide – Beck Zaratian