Telestrate your life

Anyone who watches sports has seen the cool telestrating pen that announcers can use to highlight certain plays or players by circling them or drawing lines between them. It's just a tool to point things out to the viewer. Kind of a simpler way of saying, "Ok, look at my finger. Now just above my finger. No, a little to the left."

We need an application that solves this in the real world. This idea was sort of a joke when I first throught of it, but now I think it might have some real practical uses.

I think the device would look like this: A plastic window, about 24" x 24", on an adjustable base. Maybe the stand would be made of that bendy material they use for desk lamps so you could bend and shift it however you saw fit.

So you set the thing down and adjust the screen where you want. Then you take a dry-erase pen and circle or highlight whatever you want. As an architect, maybe you point out what an improvement to a building would like by actually drawing the addition. Or in private use you circle the star you've been trying to get your date to see for the last 15 minutes. Granted, they'd have to stand behind the screen at the same angle for this to work perfectly.

As I was writing this, two thoughts that would accomplish the same thing but would be a lot simpler popped in my head.

One would be a program on a notebook where you could snap a picture with the computer and then draw on the image. So you could look at the notebook, look at real life, and accomplish the same thing. That would solve the angle problem, but you aren't actually looking at real life. And with a notebook, it would all be portable.

Finally, if you had a light pen that somehow left a strong residue so you could highlight things with light with a much smaller device. This technology exists, right? Except we're back the angle problem would still persist. But you would be looking at the real thing.