Palm Rejection when Writing on BBB's Whiteboard

[Steffen Moser]

Hi all,

many of our lecturers often use the whiteboard with their tablet devices. Most of them work with an iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil. iPads (and other tablets) have an integrated palm rejection function: They detect the Apple Pencil if it is close to the screen (less than 1 cm above the screen). When someone places his or her hand on the display while writing, the palm rejection function automatically only accepts the pencil's input and ignores touch events. Unfortunately, this is only working as long as the pencil is close enough to the screen. If the distance of the pencil gets too large (the tablet doesn't detect the pencil anymore) and people still place their hand on the screen (e.g. while talking), they often write or draw unintentionally.

That behavior upsets the lecturers.

For this reason, we think about implementing a manual palm rejection function. Idea: We are going to add a checkbox to the toolbar so that it's possible to configure the whiteboard into a mode that only pencil inputs are evaluated on the whiteboard surface. While that function is enabled, users can only write with their pencil. If they want to draw with their finger, they have to disable it.

In addition, we confirmed that behavior with a Samsung Tab Note 2014. That tablet also has an onboard palm rejection. We would like to contribute it to BBB.

Are you interested in adding that feature to BBB? If so, does it make sense to develop against BBB-2.2.x or should we start with BBB-2.3?

I'd be looking forward to hearing from you! Thank you very much in advance!

Kind regards

Steffen