There are a number of alternatives to smartboards that I will be examining (and for some…constructing…). All of these little projects will fall under the broader umbrella of presentation aides. As a student, I have been subjected to tedious, boring, time consuming presentation…or decades… The current standard is to project a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation of only 5-8 slides, most of which are filled with some bullet points… If you add in some clip art, you have the modern standard of a presentation.
For much of the next month I will be examining some hardware that allows a more dramatic presentation, and I will also be testing out some different applications which will allow for more interesting content than bullet points and clip art.
The first hardware answer I will be using is the ‘Atlas glove’ from http://atlasgloves.org. I first saw this online several years ago, but never had the opportunity to experiment with this very cool and simple use of technology. In essence, this system has two components. First, you will need a computer with a webcam, and load up the software from Atlas gloves. The other component is to build up some ‘light gloves’. This is an LED key fob light that is hot-glued to a ping-pong ball (to create a larger light source for the webcam to see…). This LED construction is then attached to some sort of glove or holder that allows the user (e.g. ‘the presenter’) to use these lights in front of the webcam (with dimmed lights to help ensure that the webcam only ‘sees’ the Atlas gloves.
The software essentially takes the input from the webcam and reduces this into something quite similar to modern touchpad ‘multi-gestures’ except in free space. Ideally the presenter will be able to control Google Earth by making ‘gestures’. This can be quite a dramatic way to present information with Google Earth. I can see that if the presenter is capable and/or interested in using this sort of ‘over the top’ shock and awe methods, this would be a great, dramatic and interesting way to capture students interest.
This will be the first of these projects that I create, especially since it takes the least hardware, and (quite honestly) looks to be the simplest to implement… I hope to have everything in place for me to present to you, the reader: the steps I went through to create the light gloves, set up the system, and finally test to see how well it works.
So, with this presented, I hope to have a follow up post on this topic within the next week…
