A design studio called Those is making a smart whiteboard that it calls “the first connected display that draws with a pen.” It’s named Joto, and it’s one part internet-enabled whiteboard, one part art display, and one part nostalgic throwback to a physical medium. It’s an eclectic mix of ideas, and it ends up resulting in a lot of wildly different imagined use cases for the device.

The wildest of Joto’s ambitions is as a notification board that integrates with a number of top services. While it’s not totally clear what Joto will be capable of, it’s easy to imagine seeing it draw tweets and Slack notifications as they come in, or display a physical version of your company’s Trello board in real time. The company also shows off using it as a household to-do list and calendar, or as a notification board to leave messages for family members or roommates. To that end, Those is offering a public API, and is already touting integrations with Google Calendar, Spotify, Alexa, Twitter, Slack, and Trello.

Joto also works as an art display, where users will be able to doodle on a phone or tablet and have their drawings re-created, pen stroke for pen stroke, in actual ink on the Joto (like a larger, wall-hanging version of the Line-us drawing robot from last month). The company is also offering a backing tier for the Joto that will include “365 Days of Art,” promising a new illustration from a variety of artists on your Joto every day for the first year (if you’re willing to pay a little extra, anyway).

I like the idea of Joto. While it’s obviously not a superfast way to have things update, the concept of using technology to blend old-fashioned analog handwriting is something that seems really interesting. It feels similar in many ways to the Little Printer, which also sought to take the endless streams of digital data and transform them into a physical object in the real world.

Joto is available to back on Kickstarter for $199, which will get you the Joto unit itself. For an extra $100, you’ll also get the “365 Days of Art,” which will include the daily curated illustrations for a year — certainly not cheap when compared to the cost of a either a more traditional digital screen or an analog whiteboard, but perhaps worth the price if the idea appeals to you.

Early-bird units of Joto are expected to ship in December later this year, with the main launch planned for March 2018. It’s worth mentioning that Those is a new company that hasn’t shipped a commercial hardware product of this scale before, and that March 2018 date is rather far away, which is certainly something to factor in before you back (especially in the historically tumultuous and delay-prone crowdfunding industry).

Source: The Verge