SMART Board for Flat-Panel Displays Plays Integral Role in Mars Mission
Mission scientists use SMART product for planning and analysis
Calgary, AB – March 29, 2004 – The SMART Board for Flat-Panel Displays interactive overlay from SMART Technologies Inc. is playing an integral role in the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission. The product has been incorporated with NASA’s plasma displays to create a network of MERBoards, or a large, touch-enabled, plasma display system with custom MERBoard software. MERBoards assist with the planning and analysis performed by mission scientists and engineers. Seventeen MERBoards are currently installed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL), which spearheads the MER mission, and five are used by scientists at NASA’s Ames Research Center, the developers of MERBoards.
The SMART Board for Flat-Panel Displays interactive overlay gives MERBoards touch control, making it possible to display and write information on one large plasma display and to share it over multiple displays. This setup helps scientists and engineers to view and analyze images in a group environment. MER mission staff can also write over images, and save images and notes for future use. These can then be distributed to others as needed. Individual staff are allotted their own storage space, or MERSpace, which they can access simply by pressing the touch-sensitive screen. With an application called the SOLTree tool, scientists and engineers also use MERBoards for long-term operational planning.
“It’s exciting to know that SMART products are helping scientists and engineers to conduct the MER mission,” says Nancy Knowlton, president and co-CEO of SMART. “It also demonstrates the diversity of solutions that SMART products can provide for people who work in collaborative environments.”
“The touch screen brings a whole collaborative element to the work practice,” says Ted Shab, MERBoard deputy project manager. “In the context of the SOLTree tool – a flowchart representation of the long-term objectives of the Rover – users can come up to the screen and interactively work with the application while they view it together. The touch screen definitely encourages a more collaborative work practice than if they were working on it one at a time at a keyboard.”
“JPL’s scientists and engineers spend countless hours training for the mission,” says Jay Trimble, member of the team of scientists that developed MERBoards. “Our objective was to develop a tool that JPL’s scientists and engineers could use easily and intuitively, simply by touching the screen. The touch screen has helped us achieve this objective.”
About MERBoards
A MERBoard system is composed of a network of large, touch-enabled, plasma display systems with custom MERBoard software. The system is supported by a centralized server and database. MERBoards are an adaptation of IBM’s BlueBoards, which incorporate SMART Board for Flat Panel Displays interactive overlays and were designed by IBM’s Almaden Research Center. The BlueBoard project aimed to improve productivity by offering easy-to-use functions to facilitate quick, spontaneous meetings. The team of scientists at NASA’s Ames Research Center added features such as remote access and control capability, plug-in architecture, plug-ins for accessing the mission’s database and the Mars clock. While the software for BlueBoard was written in Visual Basic, NASA’s research team wrote the code for MERBoards in Java to enable cross-platform compatibility.
Today, MERBoards support four core functions: the interactive whiteboard, the Web browser, the Virtual Network Connection and the MERSpace.
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