News Story

Visit of Dr Hans Geiser, UN

Wednesday 21 May 1997

Dr Hans Geiser visited the Open University on Wednesday 21st May, 1997. Dr Geiser, Director of the UN Staff College in Turin, visited the OU to see its pioneering uses of new media technology. He had a meeting with Sir John Daniel (Vice-Chancellor), and Bob Masterton (OU Worldwide and was taken on a tour of the university’s Knowledge Media Institute, and the Academic Computing service. Prof. Marc Eisenstadt introduced the Knowledge Media Institute to Hans.

Marc showed him a number of the multimedia projects in KMi.

He demonstrated KMi Radio and then presented our vision of how the KMi Stadium may revolutionize the presentation of distance education lectures.

The Stadium is an experimental Java application that explores the use of large-scale telepresence focused on the broadcasting of realtime audio and video. Marc showed our visitor one showcase use of this framework which was recently presented at the IDLCON conference in Washington in the USA. This presentation was a presented by the Vice-Chancellor Sir John Daniel over the internet.