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Review: mimioReviewed By: John Kriens Review Date: February 16, 2001
Nothing breaks up a good creative work session faster than having to stop to copy down all the work you've put up on the whiteboard. It's especially problematic if you're lazy like I am; creating the work is fun, but copying it is a chore. I don't like chores; ask my wife or my parents if you don't believe me. Mimio, from Virtual Ink, promises to do that heavy lifting, that drudgery for you. It's a collection of hardware that attaches to any standard whiteboard and captures all of your scribblings for posterity...provided you follow its simple rules.
In the old days, if you wanted to save your whiteboard scribblings, you would have to start your session on a whiteboard that had a photocopier built in. You can still do that--starting at around $1700 or so. The photocopier approach isn't terribly portable, it works slowly, and the copies don't capture the color of whatever you had drawn or written. They also are generally thermal prints on that curly thermal paper. I hate that thermal paper. Hardware:The first thing about using mimio is that you have to be premeditated in its use. This isn't bad--you just have to know that you're going to produce something worthy of being captured. Before you start you need to attach mimio to the whiteboard you will be using. This is really easy. The mimio capture bar sticks to the whiteboard using suction cups. I don't normally trust suction cups, but mimio has little tabs attached to the top of the capture bar that make it easy for the bar to get sufficient suction on the board to hold it in place. Those same little tabs make it very easy to remove the bar once you're done and ready to go home (or back to your desk). The bar also has some buttons on it that let you do things like erasing the board and tagging boards without having to go back to your computer. There is also an LED that indicates if you have a good connection to your computer.  mimio captures your whiteboard session as you write. This means that you have to have everything set up and ready to go before you start to write. You are actually capturing a little movie of the strokes that you make with your whiteboard markers. If the hardware isn't on, and the software in your PowerBook isn't active, nothing you write will be capturable by mimio.
One other thing you might want to watch out for. Since the markers are tracked by sound, the marker pressing on anything within earshot of the capture bar will be picked up as a marker stroke. I found that putting the cap back on a pen that I had just used caused a dot of that marker to appear in the mimio software if I capped it too close to the board. Out of curiosity, I did a little bit of testing and discovered that if you write with more than one pen at a time, the capture bar does not pick that up properly. This isn't unexpected; the technology for capturing the actions of even one pen is pretty impressive. Just be aware of this limitation if you think you might have more than one person writing at once. The sheer quantity of the hardware was a bit of a problem for me. I had intended to cart the thing around with me so that I could use it in any meetings that looked like they would require whiteboard capturing. However, there are so many pieces that if you plan to use mimio in this way, you will need to invest in some sort of carry case. Virtual Ink makes one (which they did not include in the review package), although any briefcase-sized bag ought to work. You have the capture bar, 4 markers, an eraser, and a USB cable. That's a lot of stuff to juggle. If you want to install mimio as "permanent" part of a conference room, there are screws supplied to permanently attach the capture bar to the board, and a little plastic disk that will hold the eraser. Software:The mimio software can be downloaded from the mimio web site. You should probably check there first to see if there is a newer version than what shipped with your unit. The current version is 1.02, and the web site promises version 1.5 soon. When you check for software, you will immediately notice that there is a whole bunch of cool-looking stuff available for mimio that is currently Windows-only. Hopefully this will be remedied in the future. A Mac version of mimioMouse did come with the unit, but I was unable to review it. mimioMouse lets you project your Mac screen onto a whiteboard and use a special mimio marker (one of the regular marker cases with a non-marking dummy pen) as a mouse. You have to find your own projector, which is the main reason that I did not test this.  Back to the mimio software. The first thing you need to do after you have set up the hardware is to configure the software. You specify the board size by selection a pre-set size or, if you don't know the board size exactly (and why would you?), you can choose custom and set the size by marking the lower right corner with one of the pens. Easy. Any time you are doing on-board configuration, the software talks to you so you don't have to leave the board and keep looking at the screen. Very nice. This isn't so much of an issue with the board size configuration, but for a more complicated, multi-step process (such as setting up the on-board control panel), this is a god-send. The control panel is a static-adhesive (like ColorForms) piece of plastic that can be stuck to the board anywhere that is convenient. Once attached and configured, you can use your mimio marker on the control panel to do all of the things that hard buttons on the capture bar allow you to do (clear the board, tag the board). It also provides a real-time calculator. This calculator also speaks each button that you press and reads you the answer to your calculations. Cool. As you draw, your pen strokes are captured like a little mini-movie. At any point, you can decide that you have something worth referring to later and "tag" it. This makes it directly referenceable, and a thumbnail of that state is shown in the right-most pane (called "Alternate Views"). This is also important, because when you print, each tagged frame will be printed as a separate page. You can also tag pages after the fact. Navigate through the mini-movie and hit the tag button when you're at a point where you want to tag. You can also use your mouse as a marker and add to the captured strokes, but (and you'll have to trust me on this) it is very hard to write things with a mouse. You're more likely to use the eraser tool to clean things up. One of the beauties of Virtual Ink making both the hardware and software is that the software is free. If you want to send a captured mimio session to someone who does not have mimio, they can just download the mimio application and view it. And since the software is cross-platform (well, Windows and Mac, at least), there are really no barriers to distributing your mimio sessions to everyone who may need them. Conclusions:mimio is a great tool. It is pretty simple to use and works well. It will take a little bit of work to become skilled at using the pens, but this is going to pay off. If you do a lot of intricate whiteboard work, you will want to get one.
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By and large, it works as advertised and works well. There are, of course, some irregularities that you will need to learn to live with. None are so great that they really cause any interference with the utility of the product, but you need to be aware of where the limitations and rough edges are to decide if you can live with mimio and if it's right for you.
mimio is able to capture the movements of your whiteboard markers by attaching each marker in it's own special mimio-case. There are four cases: red, green, blue, and black. Each case has its own special signature to the capture bar; if you put a black marker in the green case, anything you write will show up in mimio as green, even though the marks on the board are black. The cases send out a signal to the capture bar as you write, and the capture bar is able to figure out the position of the marker on the board and send it to the mimio software. The provided eraser works on the same principle: it send "eraser" signals to the capture bar. The eraser has two surfaces, 1. a detail surface for erasing small parts of the diagram, and 2. a big surface for doing wholesale erasing such as clearing off the board for another diagram.
The markers and eraser work by sending their signals when they are pressed hard enough against the board. The capture works on both sound and light, so you can tell that a marker is sending when you press down enough to hear a low buzz coming from the marker (or eraser). It will probably take you a little bit of time to optimize you marker technique so that the marker actually sends every stroke you make with the marker to the capture bar. I found that I would often miss 1/4 of a letter because I would not get to full writing pressure right away and would reduce my writing pressure too soon so the first and last fractions of my stroke would not be captured. This improved once I started writing more slowly and deliberately.