For lectures, seminars, and other presentations, speakers like to use laser pointers to point out items on their projected slides. In the old days when we simply used a video camera to record both speaker and screen, the laser pointer was visible in the recorded lecture.
Our spiffy new lecture capture system now uses a camera for the speaker only and records the screen video directly from the input to the projector. You can see examples of this in our Jones Seminar archives. The quality of the recorded slides is dramatically improved using this new approach.
Unfortunately, using a laser pointer with this new recording system works fine for the live audience but doesn’t capture the pointer on the recording of the talk. We can fix this problem by having speakers point to items on their slides using the mouse cursor which will be recorded along with the rest of the projector input. Many speakers do not want to stand at the presentation computer so they can use the touch pad to control the cursor. We tried getting speakers to use a presentation pointer with a thumb button to control the cursor, but they found that awkward.
We have acquired and will try an “air mouse” to see if that works better for speakers to control the mouse cursor for pointing to things on their slides. This wireless device uses gyroscopic motion detectors to move the mouse cursor as the user moves the device. Otherwise, it appears to the computer as a normal mouse. The hope is that speakers will find it natural enough to wave the air mouse that we can use this to enable replacing the laser pointer as the pointing device.
The device we chose is a Gyrotransport by Gyration. As an added bonus, this device has a 512MB flash disk built into the USB receiver. We were a bit concerned about the 2.4GHz frequency this product uses potentially interfering with our WiFi network, but so far we haven’t seen any problems with this.
Stay tuned for updates on how this works…
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