Microsoft's research Fifa 14 Ultimate Team Coins division

Microsoft's research Fifa 14 Ultimate Team Coins division has unveiled apredictive whiteboard aimed at making it easier to tell storiesthrough drawings and data.

SketchInsight takes simple line drawings and interprets them tocreate charts, maps and other visual representations from aparticular data set.

SketchInsight is a data enabled canvas that allows you tocreate interactive data charts through simple interactivesketches, said Bongshin Lee, who works as part of Microsoft'scomputational user experiences group.

A demonstration of the technology in the video above shows howthe device uses simple cues drawn by the presenter to pick outrelevant information easily.

Drawing an L shape tells SketchInsight to create a graph,while beginning to write labels against each axis allows thewhiteboard to suggest which data sets might be of interest.Interacting with the graphs and charts then allows the user tohighlight or focus in on particular slices of information.

Essentially, it's a combination of predictive drawing andautocomplete which would allow you to navigate big data poolseasily. It also appears to offer a degree of flexibility impossibleif using Microsoft's existing business meeting staple:PowerPoint.

The success of such a system would be tied to how easy it is todefine the data sets in advance of the presentation, and how wellintegrated the product could be with all the millions of differentmethods by which companies and individuals record information.