Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Features
Presentation & Display >> The Challenge of Next-Generation
12/29/2005
Monitors and projectors are getting slicker and sleeker, but that d'esn’t mean setting up the smart classroom is without tribulation.
Christie LX50
For her recent presentation at a private liberal arts college, a presenter confidently pulled out her laptop and set it on the table. Grabbing the handy VGA cable on the podium, she pulled it across to the table and pushed it against the back of her computer, but it didn’t feel quite right. Examining the back of her laptop, she discovered that her new laptop did not have a familiar VGA output after all; it had a DVI connector. Tech folks and staffers ran here and there, trying to find an adaptor. In the end, the presentation began 15 minutes late.
Sanyo PLC-XP56
Not too long ago at a city council meeting, a civil engineer plugged his laptop into the city council chamber’s presentation system. His computer image appeared on all of the council and audience monitors, but not on the 17-inch annotation monitor built into the podium. Alas, the monitor could not handle the wide-aspect image from his laptop.
An architect recently designed a videoconferencing room with the instructor standing at a podium in the center of the room, directly in front of two rear projection screens. Now, the instructor is blinded by one or the other of the projectors, has no nearby whiteboard space on which to work, and the camera in the back of the room cannot pick up any detail of the instructor’s face because of the brightly illuminated background. Because all the directional lights face the audience, there are only about 15 foot-candles of light on the instructor’s face (when the projectors aren’t blinding him), so the camera in the back of the room d'es a poor job of resolving facial detail for the distance education broadcast. How unfortunate.
Extron's VTG-400
These three examples, all true stories, highlight some of the greatest challenges in working with this latest generation of presentation and display systems. The same trends that are leading to the next generation of systems are creating hurdles to be overcome in current product usage. So, let’s look at the trends and how they will impact (and be affected by) current technologies, then let’s look ahead to the next generation of presentation and display, and what you will need to know to get there.
Trend 1: DVI and HDMI
The DVI (Digital Visual Interface) standard was developed by the Digital Display Working Group to replace the analog VGA standard for computer graphics. The DVI standard supports bi-directional communication between the source and display device, to enable them to agree upon an optimized output signal. This feature, designed for ease of use during setup, makes integration more complex when dealing with a classroom environment with multiple display devices. The five-meter maximum range of DVI also poses a challenge: Extenders are available, but since nearly every installed display device is more than 15 feet from the source, it’s clearly not integration-friendly.
Recommended Reading
- Sun, Stanford Working To Archive History
In May in San Francisco, experts from leading universities, libraries, and research institutions around the world met as part of an ongoing effort to address a pressing issue: archiving the world's history, right up to today.
- The Quilt Coalition Rolls Out XO Communications for High-Capacity Network Services
The Quilt, a coalition of 28 regional network organizations, has added XO Communications Services to its authorized vendor list. The Quilt represents 200 universities and thousands of other educational institutions across the United States. With this new relationship, Quilt members can purchase XO's high-speed IP transit and network transport services at competitive rates.
- Wimba Classroom 5.2 Expands Classroom Capture Support, Adds MP3 Downloads
At the NECC 2008 conference in Texas this week, Wimba launched a new version of Wimba Classroom, the virtual classroom component of the company's Collaboration Suite. The new 5.2 release expands options for classroom capture and adds a variety of other functional and ease of use features.
- Automation Chimera: Education Is Not Management
The lure of automating workflow online so human intervention is minimized is continually reinforced in the minds of higher education administrators by examples of automated campus systems such as financials, student information systems, and other enterprise systems. But what's good for management is not always good for learning.
- Cognos Releases BI Software for Linux-based IBM System z Mainframe
Cognos, which IBM acquired in January, has released an update to its business intelligence software that will run on the Linux operating system on IBM System z mainframes. IBM Cognos 8 BI was being developed by the two companies prior to the acquisition, but assimilation of Cognos into IBM accelerated development.
- Facebook and Collegiality: A Serendipitous Social Niche
Facebook is a way to greet a colleague as if she or he is on your own campus: a wave at a distance, a hello at the corner burrito place, a honk as you both leave the campus parking lot. Informal collegiality has been extended over the miles.
