IT was a packed house at Team Note-Taker's final presentation in front of the Imagine Cup judges this morning.
The team was clearly a crowd favourite - the room was almost at full capacity packed with journalists, senior Microsoft executives and senior executives from other leading organisations and competitors that didn’t make it through to the final round.
The team from Arizona State University have designed a portable device that increases note-taking speeds.
The concept was born out of frustration by legally blind team leader David S Hayden.
Mr Hayden had been using technology for vision impaired people called a monocular, which is basically a small telescope.
“The problem with the monocular is that you have this great chalkboard and now that you need to see what’s on this board you need to zoom in, so you zoom in and you have a limited field of view ,“ Mr Hayden said.
“You take some notes, you look up, you find your spot, you commit something to memory, you go down, you write some notes, go back up...
"You’re cycling constantly between notes and board ... the low vision student can’t keep up with his fully sighted peers.
Mr Hayden said the “board, no board” delay saw him withdraw from several classes, something he felt was unacceptable.
There are other existing technologies, such as using human note-takers, but Mr Hayden says tests have proven taking their own notes helps people commit things to memory.
And computerised note-takers that use a laptop camera are not very useful in math and science classes, as students are still required to enter specialised symbols and mathematical forms not readily available on a keyboard.
Note-Taker is mounted on a flat surface and plugs into a tablet PC.
The camera is controlled using software built by the team which allows users to move to the part of the board they want to see by swiping their finger across the screen. They can zoom in by tapping on the screen.
To remove the “board, no board” delay, the Note-Taker puts the user’s view of the board on the left hand side of the page, with a word processing software that supports handwritten and typed notes on the right.
This allows users to see the board and type at the same time without constantly having to refocus.
“I took it into an abstract algebra class for the first time and I was able to take notes and I was just sort of emotionally overwhelmed afterward," Mr Hayden said.
"I realised after class I wouldn’t have to go back into my text books.”
The team even accounted for poor light quality in classrooms by adding contrast enhancement option in their design.
It even inverts the light giving an effect similar to what you see when you look at camera film negative; handy if the classroom uses an old fashioned chalkboard.
Mr Hayden’s emotional presentation was interrupted with rounds of applause throughout the demonstration.
For a device that is supported on a Microsoft platform, the aesthetic of the Note-Taker device looks surprisingly like it could belong to a certain competitor who shall not be named, not at this conference.
While the video quality is incredibly high, Mr Hayden told news.com.au the files take up very little space on a tablet hard-drive. And if obsessive students do want a complete archive of their notes, the team are working on a cloud storage solution.
“Certainly a semester worth of video could fit on the tablet but beyond that if you want to keep your notes in classes you’re going to need to be able to go back to them,” he said.
The front runners say regardless of the outcome of tomorrow’s results, the team are working on getting their prototype into production pronto.
“We might start a business, or we’re go to go into production with another company but we really want to get this into people’s hands,” team member Michael Astrauskas said.
Claire Connelly is in New York covering the Imagine Cup courtesy of Microsoft
A team of students from the Center for Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing in the Fulton Schools of Engineering has created a technology device to assist low-vision students with note taking. The Note-Taker team effort won them the top award at the Imagine Cup 2011 for Software Design. David Hayden, the inventor and a low-vision student, created the device after struggling with note taking in the classroom. Several students at ASU now use the device in class.
This video was produced and edited by Walter Cronkite student, Justine Garcia, an OKED videographer/editor.
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