ViDio - Virtual Digital Annotations

Today we are far away from a paperless office. Many readers still prefer paper instead of electronic documents and thus they print out their documents for reading. Moreover, solutions for reading, annotating and editing a document away from a desktop computer are still rare to find. A reading processes that requires taking notes or annotating a document is only possible using paper. In this paper we present the prototypical system ViDio that offers the possibility of being mobile while at the same time having the ability to annotate an electronic document. Our approach is based on using mobile handheld computers (personal digital assistants – PDAs) for annotating a document. The user can download the document, read it and take notes wherever she wants. To overcome the main problem of handheld computers – the rather limited screen size – we designed a desktop part of the system that is able to visualize the document together with the annotations. This enables browsing through the document and preserves the context of an annotation. The main contribution of ViDio is the approach to combine a desktop computer to create and edit a document and an additional input device that is small and handy but nevertheless usable for note-taking.