The System:

There are three main components of eBeam Projection - the receiver, the Interactive Stylus, and the Interact Software. The hardware allows you to manipulate your computer’s desktop like a wireless mouse, but uses a projected image on a wall or whiteboard as a display instead of a monitor. eBeam Interact software gives you the power to interact with your computer in a lot of new and exciting ways through its revolutionary palette toolbar. The palette also gives you access to eBeam Scrapbook software, which is a blend of all your favorite software applications (PowerPoint, PhotoShop, and more) into one easy-to-use and easy-to-share program.

Set-Up:

Once you have the receiver mounted to the corner of your projection area (ideally, at a 90 degree angle just outside the projected image), you can use your Interactive Stylus to run through the nine-point calibration. It’s important to be as close to the center of the crosshairs as possible when you are calibrating, because that will translate into how close the cursor appears to the tip of the Interactive Stylus. Your image can be up to 8 ft by 4 ft or as small as 1.5 ft by 1.5 ft, and you have do the calibration any time you move your projector or your eBeam.

The Interactive Stylus has two buttons on it. The larger of the two is your right-click button. If you hold the pen over your desktop and press this button, the right-click menu will appear. The smaller button controls the Interact Palette toolbar. You can use this button to hide the toolbar when you don’t need it, and bring it back to where ever on the screen you need it.

The Palette:

The most flexible tool in the Interact software is the palette toolbar. There are five flavors of this toolbar that will help you navigate through your desktop and make the Interactive Stylus much more than just a wireless mouse.

Desktop Palette: From this toolbar, you can open up eBeam Scrapbook or Microsoft PowerPoint. You can also annotate the desktop, take screen captures, or open the onscreen keyboard. If you right-click on the palette, you will be able to use the Spotlight feature. This feature will hide your entire desktop behind a gray cover and allow you one “spot” to which you can see through. You can use this to draw attention to one particular point on your screen that you can move by dragging any part of the grey screen.

Desktop Annotation Palette: Since the Desktop Palette will float over all software applications you can use this to do screen mark-ups over anything on your computer. For example, if you have an Excel chart open that you want to discuss with someone, you can click on the pen tool on the Desktop Palette and the palette will change into Desktop Annotation mode. Your screen will freeze, and you will be able to draw on it with a pen, highlighter, or various lines and shapes just like a football commentator drawing out a play on the TV screen. Once you’ve finished with the annotations, you have two choices – you can either exit the screen annotation without saving the mark-ups with the Mouse icon at six o’clock or you can use the Save icon at seven o’clock. The whole screen plus the annotations will then be saved to a page in eBeam Scrapbook.

Scrapbook Palette: This palette has all the functionality you will need to create interactive and dynamic presentations, including pen, highlighter, text box, screen capture, and zoom:

Pen: Change color and line thickness by clicking the inside of the palette.

Highlighter: Change color and line thickness by clicking the inside of the palette.

Eraser: Choose width by clicking the inside of the palette.

Zoom (magnifying glass): Allows you to zoom from 25% to 5000%.

Text Box (capital T): Choose font size and style by clicking inside the palette, includes bold, italics, underline, and text color.

Screen Capture (camera): Choose from a full screen capture or just a section of the screen. If you choose a full screen capture, the dialogue box will close and Scrapbook will minimize, there will be a quick flash of your desktop, then a snapshot of whatever you had open under Scrapbook will appear on a Scrapbook page. If you choose to “Capture a Selection,” the dialogue box will close, Scrapbook will minimize and your desktop will flash. After it flashes, your cursor will turn into a cross, which will let you make a box around anything you would like to import into the software. Once you’ve made the box, you will see a dialogue with a preview of the capture and you choose how you would like to import it – as is, stretched to fill the screen, etc. Make your selection and click “OK.” Your selection will then appear on a Scrapbook page.

Full Screen Scrapbook Palette: When you are in Scrapbook, you can choose to open Full Screen view and your Scrapbook pages will appear like a PowerPoint slide show. You can access this from the Full Screen icon on the main toolbar or from View > Full Screen View. When you are in Full Screen View, the palette will change so you are able to navigate forward and back and use the pen, highlighter, eraser and screen capture tools.

PowerPoint Palette: This palette opens over top of your full screen slide show. You can use it to navigate back and forth through your slides and add annotations on the fly. There is even a preference that you can save the mark-ups as part of the .ppt file or just erase them when you go to the next slide (right-click on the palette and go to Options… and then the Annotation tab).

Scrapbook:

There are many features included in the eBeam Scrapbook software. It is a place where you can bring together already existing documents, pictures, and content from your computer into one place and shape them into a single presentation. It is also a place where you can create presentations on the fly by using it as a “virtual whiteboard” to capture all your handwritten notes and diagrams.

Background Colors and Grids (Page > Background Settings…): This allows you to choose which color would like to have as a background to your page. You can also choose whether to have a graph or lines on the page as well.

Cover Sheet (Right-click anywhere on the Scrapbook page and choose Use Cover Sheet or View > Use Cover Sheet): This will cover your entire page with a grey layer that you can move back and forth like a sheet of paper over an overhead transparency. There are settings so you can make the sheet opaque or see-through and then choose which side of the page the sheet pulls back from.

Full screen view (Use the Full Screen icon on the main tool bar, right-click anywhere on the page and choose Full Screen view, or View > Full Screen View): This fills your whole screen with a single page so that it resembles a PowerPoint Slide in a slide show. The whole screen is writable area, and you can use the Full Screen Palette to navigate back and forth and add new pages.

Image Gallery (Use the icon on the main toolbar or File > Image Gallery): This is a window where you can link to any image files you have on your computer. Click on the “Add Directory” icon and you can set-up a shortcut to a file like My Pictures. Once My Pictures is listed in the Image Gallery, every time you open it, you will see its entire contents, which you can then use as image objects or background images in Scrapbook. This works for .jpg, .gif, .bmp, .wmf, .ico, and .emf image types.

Importing Background Images (File > Import Background Image or Page > Background Settings): With this feature, you can import Word documents, Excel spreadsheets or charts, PowerPoint presentations, and .jpg, .gif, .bmp, .wmf, .ico, and .emf image files. As a Background Image, they can’t be edited, but you can annotate over top of them and share them online.

Importing Image Objects (Page > Add Image… or Open the Image Gallery and do one of three things – use the Add Image icon, double click on the image in the viewer, or drag-and-drop into the Scrapbook Page. You can also drag-and-drop images from anywhere on your computer (My Pictures, clip art galleries, etc.)): Image objects can be .jpg, .gif, .bmp, .wmf, .ico, or .emf, and you can rotate, resize, or reorder them anywhere on the screen. A neat trick with Image Objects in Normal view is that you can actually copy an image object from the main page onto one of the thumbnails on the left by dragging and dropping!

Layers (View > Layers): This is a feature that allows you to build up pages like adding one transparency on top of another on an overhead projector. Each layer can have its own drawings, text, and objects that can be made visible or invisible and can be locked so they can’t be changed by accident.

Master Slide (View > Master Page): Setting a Background Image on this page will appear on every existing or newly created page in the Scrapbook file. The Master Page can be changed at any time, and you can override it on individual pages if you manually import another background image for that page.

Page Sorter ( Normal or Thumbnail View): You can rearrange the order of your slides by dragging and dropping the thumbnails in either Normal or Thumbnail View.

Playback (View > Toolbar > Playback): The playback toolbar allows you to replay your entire presentation back stroke-by-stroke. You can play it as a loop (all pages or just one) or you can move the slider to revisit one particular part.

Saving As (File > Save As): Choose to save your Scrapbook file as a Scrapbook file (.esb), PDF, Bitmap, JPEG, TIFF, Metafile, a PowerPoint presentation, or as a PowerPoint show. You can even choose to save it as a Web Page (HTML).

Sharing:

From within the Scrapbook window, you can choose to share your notes online and in real time. Using either the internet or a LAN, you can broadcast your eBeam Scrapbook over the internet where anyone in the world with an internet connection can join and see what you’re doing in the software while you’re doing it.