The Server Room

Onfinity CM2 Portable Interactive Whiteboard (aka The Laser Thing)

We recently received a try-before-you buy Onfinity Portable IWB System to have a play with. It looks a bit like this:

Yes, the picture is tiny. That’s because I’m too lazy to take one myself.

The basic idea is that you can have interactive whiteboard features without having to use a touch-sensitive board (and at a much lower cost). This means you can use it anywhere you can set up a projector and laptop (in theory! read on…).

Set up

You set this little (12.5 x 8.5 x 2.5 cm, 250g!) gizmo up in your room, pointing at the surface you are projecting on. Next, plug it into your PC/laptop USB port and press a button to bring up 2 red laser dots on your surface. The dots define the extent of the area you can work within, so typically you’d make it slightly bigger than your projector image. Assuming you’ve already got the driver installed on your computer, you just have to do a standard IWB clicking-on-dots calibration routine and you’re golden!

How it works

The pens you use have a small infra-red LED on the end (so yes, they take batteries – full specs here: CM2 Specs). As you press down with the pen (or use the button on the telescopic “wand” version) the LED flashes and the sensor device (shown above) tracks its location. The clever part is that the sensor can be at just about any angle to your surface and it will still work out where the pen is on your computer screen’s image. The pens have a right-click button as well, a la Promethean pens. The sensor even runs off USB power, which makes life much simpler if you want to mount it on your ceiling.

Limitations

Obviously, if you get between then pen and the sensor, it won’t be able to see what the pen is doing and you won’t be able to draw. That is a major problem if you’re using the comedy tripod shown, but when ceiling mounted (mount provided), we didn’t find it an issue.

The maximum size of your projection area is huge. They quote a figure of 150 inch diagonal (over 4 times the area of a large IWB!) Unfortunately, there’s a direct relationship between the size of the active area and the distance the sensor has to be positioned from the screen:

For a classroom, you’re looking at positioning the sensor around 2.7m from the wall (say) and that just isn’t always practical if you’re having to stand the little tripod up there. Again, ceiling mounted this isn’t usually a problem.

Batteries! I have no idea how long they’ll last, but there’s a law of physics which states that battery voltage decreases linearly with an increase in teacher stress levels (and vice versa). At least they’re cheap.

The software is a little basic to say the least. If you’ve used Promethean’s cut-down “Px” software – imagine a “lite” version of that. It also likes to crash if the user doesn’t have write access to its folder (the default if your users run as standard users rather than as admins). It covers the basics of annotation, but don’t expect anything fancy. For serious work, you’d probably want to license software from your usual whiteboard supplier.

Overall impressions

I was surprised. It’s one of those rare bits of technology that sounds complete turd when described to you, but does actually do the job quite successfully. The major failing seems to be in the way that it’s marketed. Rather than selling it as a portable whiteboard, OnFinity really should be pushing the CM2 as a low cost way to get interactivity – as a portable device it’s just too much of a pain in a classroom environment: one nudge from an inquisitive finger and your calibration is screwed.

Being able to write on a normal whiteboard with your choice of drywipe pens or the CM2 pen has got to be a bonus, making the facilities in a room more flexible for teachers with differing preferences and skills.

In short, I think we’ll be keeping ours. Including mounting it on the ceiling, it took about 30 minutes to set up and cost around 1/3 of the price of a similarly sized IWB – around £450 (not including the projector and PC).