Have a projector at the back of big conference presentations

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Fancier conferences put up two projectors to let the audience see the slides. But the presenters still look at their slides on a notebook on the podium, or in some cases on a monitor on the floor below their stage.

How about adding a projector that projects on the back wall, just above the heads of the audience, for the speaker to see their own slides? Then they can roam the stage and see the slides without losing eye contact with the audience. They may not be able to see clear detail on the slides but they shouldn't need it.

It's true this does not work as well for "Presenter mode" which shows the speaker a different display on the notebook from what is seen on the projector, both because most notebooks don't have two video outputs, and also because you don't want to give the audience access to your notes and the title of the next slide as is often shown in presenter mode. However, not too many use this and it's not usually the end of the world if somebody can look back and see the notes.

You also want to show the speaker a clock. If that can be overlaid on the rear screen, great, but this can also be done as a different screen with a big clock. Projectors and screens are small enough to make this workable at fancy conferences.

Comments

I used to work for a distance learning program, that would connect through the internet to other DE sites. The setup we ran was two projectors in the front (one showing the presentation, one showing whatever DE site was currently active) and then two in the back (same thing). It did allow the speaker to both look at the audience while still looking at the slides and look at the camera while looking at the image from the other DE sites. Otherwise the presenters have a tendency to turn around and look at the de site on the front screen, which gave the camera at the site the back of their head.

Unless the second projector was behind the audience, they would have light shining in their eyes-making the first projector harder to see. The closer to the back wall it was, the smaller the projected image would be (rrom size would be key, as would audience size). If you listen carefully to the presenter you would'nt really need to pay attention to him, his eyes or whatever it is you would rather be distracted by. I would gladly have the presenter present from another room if the information he was giving was going to be better. Im really not bothered whether he looks at me...Unless of course he was a she and she was Halle Berry!

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