A remote lecture system with laser pointer for the Internet and broadband networks

These days, many systems of remote lectures and meetings have been developed in many universities and companies. We also have tried to realize a good remote lecture system for some graduate school classes. Our system is designed for lectures via large scale networks such as the Internet and JGN (Japan Gigabit Network), and also we are trying to add some media to the system, in addition to conventional ones such as video, voice, text and image data. This time, we propose a new remote lecture system which can also send information of pointed position with a special laser pointer on the screen in the classroom to each remote site PC. Using this system, students in remote sites can receive classroom view, lecturer´s voice, diagrams and characters written on the white board, clear presentation slide images and moreover, the lecturer´s pointing position, which is shown as a large arrow mark overlapped on the slides. We state system concept, whole system architecture especially for the case of using the Internet, and some technique for acquisition of pointing position information from the screen in the classroom and its distortion correction. At last, we mention that this system works well enough to provide good lecture quality for our graduate school classes.