The future of office interaction is coming my friends and I for one am welcoming my whiteboard masters with open arms. The brainy folks at MIT have developed an amazing system (Assist Sketch Understanding System) which recognizes drawings on a smart board allowing users to create dynamic sketches with varying degrees of interactivity and intelligence. One of the examples shown involves the presenter sketching a small car on an inclined plane. After sketching this on the whiteboard, he presses the run button and the drawing is instantly animated and even reacts accordingly to the presenter NOT having drawn axles for the wheels! I can see this being used in many industries, especially by game designers and animators in order to mock up level design or character prototypes! I have no information on whether this technology will be available anytime soon or ever at all, but we can all hope to have one day have one of these boards in our meeting rooms.

Watch the MIT presentation after the jump..