You don’t need to take copious notes of whiteboard presentations. Microsoft has developed a clip-on device for the presenter’s pen that beams the written words to a PC, where they are converted to text (US 2004/0140964).
As the pen moves, a camera on it films the letters. The whiteboard is overprinted with a faint grid-like pattern that varies over the entire surface, so no two areas have the same combination of lines. The camera uses it to log the position and shape of every letter, allowing optical character-recognition software on the PC to convert the handwriting to text.
