CADD MicrosystemsJuly 12th, 2017
You may remember a post I did last fall about the Association for Preservation Technology Documentation Workshop, that I've been a part of since 2014. If you haven't read that post, you can see it here. For this post, I want to focus more on the technology that we used to make the presentation happen. I was unable to attend the last stop on the Workshop's road trip at the end of April. After talking with the organizers, we thought that it would be great to give the presentation jointly, with my colleague, Brandon Friske (who was there in person) and me (patched in remotely). This is when the fun started.
We first tested out Skype for Business and Join.me so that I could advance my own slides. Skype wouldn't work for Brandon, and Join.me wouldn't work for me. We then decided that I should be patched in via FaceTime through Brandon's iPhone 6, which was hooked up to a TV. We made a couple of runs to an electronics store, first to get the right cable, and then a second time to get a portable bluetooth speaker (the HDMI cable from the phone would only carry the video, not the audio, to the TV). We finally got it to work and ran a final test the morning of to make sure.
Here's a picture of our setup.
Brandon put his phone next to the computer facing the projected presentation (so I could see it), and he advanced the slides when I told him to (although at this point, he mostly knew when to because we've given this presentation together so many times).
To recap, here's all that was used in this presentation:
- Laptop connected to a projector
- iPhone 6 connected via HDMI to a TV for video and a portable bluetooth speaker for audio
- FaceTime for videoconference using 4G over the phone
It turned out to be very successful and I think that we made a big impact, especially because our presentation subject matter was so relevant - technologies that help the AEC industry from survey/documentation, design, project management, construction, and facilities management.