On Thursday, August 18, 2005 10:49:56 AM -0500 "James M. Polk"
<jmpolk@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
At 06:25 AM 8/18/2005 -0400, Jeffrey Altman wrote:
In my working group I would say that a bigger factor related to the
improved ability to hold a technical discussion were the four floating
microphones.
floating mics are a bad idea for many reasons - each getting worse with
room and or audience size increasing.
Your hypothetical problems notwithstanding, in _actual practice_, we found
them to be extremely useful in KITTEN and in some other sessions. In the
case I remember, there were a total of six microphones in the room - a
table mic for the chair, a wireless clip-on for the current speaker, two
floor mics, and two wireless mics that could be passed around.
In actual usage we treated the "speaker" mic the same as the others, which
effectively gave us an easy way to have a discussion in which 2-3 people
speak frequently and many others speak less often. If you're not one of
the 2-3, you get up and go to the mic. If/when it becomes clear that you
are, you get a wireless mic (or multiple people sitting near each other
share one).
For this case, the floor control problem is the same as that for an
in-person conversation between a group of people without microphones of any
kind. People can talk at the same time, interrupt each other, etc., and
you mostly have to expect everyone to behave reasonably. This is different
from the problem for a multi-user conferencing system, where there may be
technical reasons why it is desirable to have exactly one designated
speaker at a time, rather than mixing audio from all sources.
I know the audio setup is largely determined by what the venue can/will
provide, but I would _very_ much like to see something similar to what we
had in Paris; that is, a mixture of 1-2 fixed floor mics and at least 2-3
floating wireless mics. This venue had plenty of things to complain about,
but this was one aspect which I found superior to other sites we've been to.
-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <jhutz+@xxxxxxx>
Sr. Research Systems Programmer
School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility
Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA
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