Inking on Video InkShow

Have you ever watched John Madden doing his football analysis, inking all over the players, marking playing routes and wished you could do that on your Tablet PC? Well, your wait could almost be over.

During Mobile Connections, Microsoft’s Stefan Wick demoed a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application that showed how Tablet PC users could ink on a video. Even better, during the Hands-On Lab, developers got to work on the same code and do it themselves.

During my session at the Hands-On-Lab, I shot this video so you could see if for yourself. The implications of being able to ink on the video and have the ink play back in real time, in sync with the video are great. Imagine marking up a video with your kids handwriting, and then sending it to Grandma and Grandpa with a special handwritten note. What about the lawyer or doctor with video of an EEG and wants to write on the video, marking critical areas, and then sends the video off to a colleague across the country with the important parts marked and circled, notes made, and played back in real time with the video. In addition to marking up is the ability to have that ink searchable through attributes stored with the video, on your desktop, on the web, etc! The possibilities are endless.

Remember that this app is a prototype  and not fully developed – but it shows the promise. All it needs are developers to take the app and finish it off, develop some products around it, or integrate into some other applications. Developers, look for this sample code to be made available soon on msdn.com/mobilepc . I will post an article when all the sample code from Mobile Connections becomes available for download.

UPDATE: Stefan Wick, the developer who demoed the application at Mobile Connections, just let me kow that the sample code is available for download here. In addition, he said they are working on a detailed developer article to be posted at https://msdn.com/mobilepc

• Watch the InkShow (22.3mb, 4:13 Windows Media streaming, or direct download)
• Visit the MSDN Mobile PC site
• Visit the Windows Presentation Foundation website

Enjoy!

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