Videoconferencing

All I've been doing for the past two days is continue reading this general relativity book.

Except for yesterday afternoon, when I had this meeting with some other NSERC students, one from here, three from Dalhousie in Halifax, and four students University of New Brunswick. But here's the kicker: no-one left their respective schools. The meeting was only to introduce ourselves and to see the system. At our school we had two massive LCD displays side-by-side, with top-quality webcams above, a speaker system below, and microphones scattered about the room. The two screens are hooked up to a computer which runs the software. On the screen we see about a dozen video feeds across the three schools (which all have similar setups, though Dalhousie's was more advanced with five touch-sensitive screens since they developed the system) and we could all talk and interact in real-time. It was very cool. Throughout the summer we're going to be pushing the system to its limits, improving ease-of-use, as well as developing interaction techniques that will be used to eventually teach entire courses over this system. Very high tech, very cool.