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University lectures typically entail a professor at the front of the room with a clicker in hand to advance the slides of their presentation. But imagine a classroom where the professor is completely hands free; they don’t have to hold a clicker, return to their laptop or tablet to advance the next slide, and are able to freely pick up a prop to better explain what they are talking about, all while maintaining control over their presentation. That’s the classroom Alexandre Douplik, a professor from the Department of Physics, and PhD student Aditya Pandya are hoping to make a reality.

With funding from Ryerson’s Learning and Teaching Enhancement Fund (LTEF), the pair is developing a gesture recognition system that can be easily deployed from any lecture hall podium.

“The essence of our project is really simple,” said Douplik. “We want to unleash the lecturer and give them the freedom to move anywhere in the classroom – including among students, to become part of the audience – but at the same time maintain their control over their slide presentation via gestures. It will also give students a new way to interact with their professor.”

The technology driving the project is Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox 360, the popular controller-free gaming device. A year after launching Kinect, Microsoft realized there was a fast-growing market for non-gaming applications particularly in health care. The company released an academic and enthusiast software development kit for non-commercial projects; Douplik and Pandya are customizing that software for the university classroom.

“Surprisingly, the efforts towards prototyping such devices at a Canadian or American university have been scarce and have not generated a lot of research activity yet,” said Pandya. “While we found examples of how the technology is being used in hospitals, in elementary schools and for some commercial purposes, there seems to be an untapped opportunity to adapt it for higher education teaching.”

During the first phase of the project, the team is focusing on making the system simple and viable to use. They want it to be compatible with any 2D projector found in a typical Ryerson lecture hall, and will focus on three simple actions: scrolling a slide up and down, zooming in and zooming out, and highlighting particular slide content.  

 “Sure, we could take a more complicated approach but we want to ensure that the system is reliable and simple,” said Douplik. “Our measure of success will be making professors happy with its ease of use.”

Douplik also wants to make sure that the system is tested not only in the physics classrooms where he teaches. He sees the system as being useful for teaching in the social sciences and humanities, as well as other natural sciences, architecture, and design and communication.

The biggest challenge for the pair will be to scale the technology for the classroom environment. Potential problems are varied – from isolating the ambient interference from effective tracking of the lecturer under variable lighting conditions to the position of the lecturer among students who are also raising their hands and voices. Douplik recognizes that while Ryerson students may find the technology “neat”, he knows that a balance has to be achieved to ensure they are not distracted from learning.

If the first phase of the project is successful, they would like to eventually add voice recognition and 3D options.

“Imagine students wearing 3D glasses in class. The professor is able to use the system to grab an object from the screen, pull it out in front of the students and manipulate or rotate it in a hypertextual context,” said Douplik. “Now, that is neat.”

Douplik and Pandya’s project is one of eight funded in 2012-13 through the LTEF, created to support learning and teaching excellence, a key priority of Ryerson’s Academic Plan. The LTEF, administered through the Learning and Teaching Office, aims to increase faculty ability to apply innovative learning strategies in the classroom, labs, studios and work placements, as well as to support scholarly research around higher education teaching.