I’m a huge fan of spy films and whilst watching ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ recently it occurred to me that arranging items on a pegboard was an investigative approach worthy of an upgrade.
Today’s invention, therefore, is a smart pinboard.
As well as being able to write and draw on the background, as in a conventional smartboard, this system would enable documents etc to be attached to the board using magnetic ‘drawing pins’.
Each pin would contain a series of leds, each of which could be masked or illuminated in a chosen colour so that the cold-war era ribbons showing connections could be superseded. This would enable items of evidence to be assembled in a 2-D framework and their relationships displayed.
Any two items could be linked by the beam joining their pins. Beams would be frequency coded so that moving an item would allow the beams from other items to follow and maintain the pattern.
A pin might be able to read and store data from its document and even moved by computer-controlled magnets within the board so as to shake up thinking and spot possible new connections (arraying paperwork by date, for example, would be feasible).
