The Effects of Presenting in HyperMirror

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of giving a presentation in a "HyperMirror" (HM) environment (a shared virtual space), i.e., is it easier to give a presentation in a shared virtual space or in a real-world classroom. HM is a special type of videoconferencing system that has been used successfully for distance learning. With HM, everyone appears in the same video image; in other words, everyone appears as though they are in the same room. The HM video image is created from superimposing the video of people and shared objects from one site on the video of the other site or superimposing the videos of people and shared objects from both sites on separate shared video and/or images, such as PowerPoint slides from a computer. In addition, HM allows physical communication and promotes deeper understanding by allowing participants to "share" and "interact" with each other and objects in local and remote sites. When presenting in a HM environment, participants stand in front of the PowerPoint slides and can point to different parts of a slide without moving around because the image of the presenter is overlaid on the PowerPoint slide. We carried out a distance learning project on July 27, 2012 between middle schools in Nara, Japan and Singapore success. A questionnaire given afterwards to the Singaporean participants revealed most of them felt comfortable with presenting in the HM environment.