Expansion of a video conferencing system
Expansion of a video conferencing system
Background
Video conferencing has proven to be very useful in various situations: Especially when people are abroad for a longer period of time for research or study abroad and cannot come to the university for a meeting, a video conference can be an adequate substitute. This is particularly important when supervising Diplom or Master's theses that are written during a stay abroad.
In addition to two-person meetings, it can also be useful to connect individual external persons to a conference or meeting. However, the problem for these people is that they only ever see a section of the meeting room, especially if several people are talking to each other or moving around the room. Expensive commercial video conferencing systems are therefore equipped with a moving camera that automatically focusses on the person currently speaking and follows them.
Job description
In the System Software and Distributed Systems department, a swivelling camera and several Bluetooth headsets were purchased, with the help of which a comparable system is to be realised. In addition to integrating the camera into the freely available video conferencing software Ekiga (formerly GnomeMeeting), the aim is to investigate and, if possible, realise whether and how one or more speakers in a room can be located with the help of several distributed Bluetooth dongles. The camera should then either be automatically focussed on the speakers or manually controlled by a remote participant.