A message board system on WWW with a visualizing time function for on-door communication

We have brought a message board on the door of a room in a student hall of residence into the WWW environment as a novel type of asynchronous communication system. The idea of this research came from the experience of an extensive use of such a message board in a postgraduate student hall of residence. We call the type of communication through this type of a message board "on-door communication." We have tried and developed such a system on the network as a message board system on WWW for asynchronous communication. The system provides users with simple tools for drawing. Letters are coded as a collection of lines. Users write messages by hand making use of a mouse and a tablet. We incorporate a feature for time visualization into the system, so that messages in the past would fade out of the board gradually. It is this feature that makes our system significantly different from the other whiteboard systems on the network; the latter are implemented usually for real-time communications. The paper reports our design and implementation of a prototype system as well as its operation. The evaluation of the drawing function is reported briefly.