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'Hologram' Lecturers To Teach Students at Imperial College London (bbc.com)
Imperial College London will be using holograms of lecturers to teach students from afar. "Imperial will initially limit its use to its Business School's activities but expects the technology could eventually become common," reports the BBC. From the report: Strictly speaking, the illusions are not holograms but neither are they the Pepper's Ghost effect used by politicians including French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon and India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi as well the entertainment industry. Instead, they use a technique developed by a Canadian company, Arht Media. "The problem with Pepper's Ghost is that it can be intricate to set up and can cost about $200,000 to run an event," said Dr David Lefevre, director of Imperial's Edtech Lab. "This is simpler -- you project upon a glass screen, and a backdrop behind it uses software to give it an illusion of depth. "It runs at the low thousands each time, so for the first time universities can afford it." To send their image, lecturers need to use a "capture studio," which involves filming them against a black backdrop while being lit from both sides.
Could people PLEASE stop calling these 2d projections 'holograms' and learn what an actual hologram is??
Unless something radical happened lectures tend to just be some guy droning on about a subject, often as not with his back to the audience so he can read off the power-point presentation. How does this benefit from being in pseudo 3D?
The University of You Tube
With YouTube, I can pause, watch again, skip the parts I found easy, repeatedly watch the challenging parts
Real time learning is non-optimal
Cool, but is this really any better than a video conference?
It is a video conference. The "capture studio" sounds expensive, but "low thousands" for the projector doesn't sound all that obscene. Whether it's worth it depends on how beneficial the illusion of the instructor's physical presence is in terms of classroom interaction &c. is relative to the price premium over a 2D projector.
DATABASE WOW WOW
It looks cool. I'm sorry the fun child in you who likes cool looking things died.
Help me Professor Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope!
It's the business school. They're not going to be any good at raising the next generation of CEOs without 'wowing' them with some shiny new technology, now are they? I'm told they're going to be marking end of term papers using blockchain and industry-standard REST APIs.