Eye Contact

Eye-to-eye contact between the teacher and the distributed students is a critical factor for ob-taining successful distance training through visual communication tools. It is only possible to obtain that by having knowledge about:

• Proper mechanisms for distributing the PC screen either as a video signal or as a parallel data stream in real time. It should be noticed that proper solutions must handle communication through firewalls.
• Selecting the proper size and location of the monitors, as well as selection of proper presentation surface areas in the rooms.
• How to distribute monitors, digital blackboards and camera(s) in a flexible way and at the same time in such a way that it is adapted to the size of the room, e.g. how to handle groups of 3-5 persons, as well as groups in the range of 10-15 persons. Special attention must be given to larger groups.
• Microphones, camera tracking, strengthening of the sound, etc. are critical com-ponents that, if done wrong, will stress the teacher and the students when they communicate, yielding a non natural collaboration environment.
• Digital blackboards are produced with various surface layers, whereby it is very important to select digital blackboards that use video projectors explicitly adapted to the selected surface of the blackboard.
• The main principles for designing and localisation of the steering system is very important as it might reduce the threshold for using the system considerably by various teachers, i.e. teachers that are not very interested into the technology.

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