Jeff - great stuff!!! Thank you so much. You addressed all the scale-up
issues we are worried about -- but as you say, we may not be able to
square that circle, especially with the budget we have. But this is
great info for us to consider as we move forward. Your hands-on analysis
will help us greatly.
Bonnie
P. S., I forgot to mention that these "get-togethers" happen twice a
week, so flying isn't an option - we'd always be in the air ;-)
Jeff Howard wrote:
Hi Bonnie,
I've suffered through plenty of group meetings/presentations over
video conference and even with an expensive Polycom system (fantastic
video quality) it was nearly always a train wreck.
One observation is that you really need to be able to see both the
presenter and what's being presented simultaneously for an effective
presentation.
Our Polycom system had the ability to pan and zoom the camera and we
would go back and forth from the speaker to whatever they were
presenting, but it's not enough. You need to be able to see with
perfect clarity what's being presented, and zooming in on whatever
they're projecting on their side doesn't cut it. You also need to be
able to see who's talking. Otherwise it's easy to lose interest. Plus
all that panning is incredibly tedious.
I've addressed this in a couple different ways.
When I interviewed for my first job out of grad school I knew it was
going to be over video conference since they had a west coast and east
coast location. My solution was to make two copies of my presentation
on large format 11x17 paper, number the pages, put them in a plastic
binder (by Itoya) and Fed-Ex one copy to the west coast office. That
way I could take a bit of unfamiliar technology out of the equation,
and we could use the videoconference to focus on face-to-face
communication. It worked really well.
The downside is that this doesn't scale beyond about half-a-dozen
people on each side of the call and it would require an incredible
amount of up-front work (and expense) for your students to prepare
multiple copies of their presentations far enough in advance to
actually Fed-Ex them across the planet in time. We tried this at CMU
once for a project with a sponsor on the west coast and cut thing very
close (the FedEx arrived literally during the video call). So it's
logistically difficult.
The solution I formulated once I began to work with videoconferencing
on a daily/weekly basis was a dual-screen system. Using the main
conference system for face-to-face communication and then using VNC to
create a mirror of the presenter's computer slides so we could see
what they were seeing without constantly having to verbally sync (what
slide are you on?). Normally we'd crowd around the mirrored laptop,
but again, that doesn't scale so you'd have to use a projector.
That introduces another problem. Making the room dark enough to
project while making it also light enough for video conferencing is a
tricky balance. The needs of the projector usually win out and you end
up putting everyone to sleep in the dark. The ideal would be to have a
large-format HDTV secondary display at each location to use for the
slide presentation. It should be located near the screen being used to
videoconference.
Of course, this all only works if you have digital presentations. The
only way I can see this really working for design school type crits is
to have a videographer (student volunteer?) on each side streaming
images of the wall sketches from a secondary video camera to the
mirrored presentation screen in real time. You could hook that
secondary camera up to the mirrored laptop via firewire. But you'd
also need some way to switch between the A and B streams whenever
things switch from presenting analog sketches to presenting digital
slides. That means you'd need a 2nd student volunteer operating the
laptop to handing the directorial duties.
What I've just described is a poor man's version of something called
"telepresence" being developed by companies like Cisco, HP and others.
They generally set up dedicated telepresence suites. These are
probably out of your price range, but you might look to them for
inspiration. Here are some systems that stood out when I researched
this a few years ago.
- Cisco Telepresence 3000
- HP Halo Collaboration Studio
- Polycom RPX Telepresence Solutions
- Telanetrix Digital Presence Systems
- Teliris VirtuaLive HD Modular Telepresence Solution
- Destiny Telesuite System
Room configuration is really important (which is one of the advantages
to the pre-designed suite).
Imagine that your near and far locations are arranged so that each
side can see each other through a common window (the TV). If the
presenter is near the TV, they're placed in a position of having to
turn their back on either the near or far group. This alienates one
group or the other, and things quickly devolve into multiple separate
groups rather than one big group.
Part of the solution is to always have the main speaker in such a
position that they face both the camera/TV and the physically
co-located group.
. . .
If you have no budget for tech support you probably don't have a huge
technology budget either. And your solution needs to be set up and
broken down before and after each class, in less than 10 minutes in a
location you don't control. Unless I'm mistaken, you need a free,
portable, high quality telepresence solution that can handle multiple
groups with dozens of people. I don't think you can square that circle.
Here's what I think you would need to do this really well (although
I'm skeptical about whether it's possible to facilitate a 50-person
critique, even if they were all in the same room together).
- Dedicated room for presentations (set it up once and forget it)
- Teleconference system with a high quality camera (remote pan/zoom)
- Roving (mutable) microphone for questions
- Dedicated network connection for video conferencing
- Secondary DV cameras for B-coverage
- Dedicated laptops for mirroring (could be student laptops, but tricky)
- Large-format HDTV displays (with DV to HDMI adapter)
- VNC (free!)
It's also going to take lots of practice for the students to become
adept at presenting this way. It's easy to forget about the far
audience(s) and focus on the physical audience, particularly because
the lag makes it difficult for the far audience to get a word in
edgewise unless you design in ways to pull them into the conversation.
It's a learned skill, just like presenting in front of a physical crowd.
You might do the math and find it's easier just to fly everyone to
Portugal. :-)
// jeff
On Jan 9, 2009, at 6:53 AM, Bonnie John wrote:
The masters program in HCI at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh,
USA, has a joint program with the University of Madeira, Portugal and we
offer a joint project class where the students are dong an extended, 8-
to 12-month project. They need to present their preliminary designs
simultaneously to both groups and get feedback from both groups. Last
year, our video conferencing equipment was not up to the task -- too low
quality, too many drop-outs in transmission, and far too hard to set up
and maintain (we have no staff to do that, nor budget to hire video-tech
staff).
________________________________________________________________
Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)!
To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org
Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe
List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines
List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
