Inspiration
As engineering students, we're always using whiteboards to plan projects, solve problems, and indulge in the occasional humorous doodle. But what happens when whiteboards aren't easily accessible, the markers are out of ink, and we're desperately in need of a space to put down our ideas?
What it does
FreeBoard is a gesture sensitive virtual whiteboard that tracks a user's hand movements and translates the motion into drawings. The drawings are overlayed on top of a videofeed to create a more interactive experience. FreeBoard can be live streamed to a phone and projected onto a wall--- just like a real whiteboard!
How we built it
We used OpenCV to run a laptop webcam, pull frames from the videofeed, and process the frames to recognize gestures and overlay drawings onto the feed.
Challenges we ran into
The hardest part of this project was defining our user experience. We settled on two main modes for our whiteboard: draw and clear. In draw mode, the user's hand motion is tracked and the data is translated onto the videofeed as "ink." In clear mode, the user makes a specific hand gesture that wipes the drawing from the board instantly. Planning the algorithm to make this work and understanding how to use OpenCV to process the video as we needed was a challenging process.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of making something that we ourselves would love to use!
What we learned
After struggling with OpenCV, we feel more comfortable with the API and we have some ideas on how to not only improve on FreeBoard but build some other projects as well.
What's next for FreeBoard
We're looking to improve on FreeBoard's hand detection algorithm for faster and more responsive gesture recognition. We're also looking to add some features to make our virtual whiteboard more user friendly, like different colored "ink."
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