When you are speaking it gets difficult to gauge how engrossed the audience is to your speech or training. This has been one of the concerns for all event organisers. But nowadays there is a solution to this problem with the introduction of a neat technology that allows you to engage and interact with the audience in real time. An audience response system is a popular tool that is used worldwide to improve a normal Powerpoint Presentation Slideshow. The inception of and audience response system is a very easy way to either survey the audience or get an instant feedback from them. This helps the speaker realise what the audience thinks or feels about the points raised in the presentation through the voting system. If there are any misconceptions in the minds of the audiences than that can be clarified with immediate effect. There are other uses of the audience response system such as it can be used to ask interactive questions, take polls or understand the knowledge of the audience on the specific topic. This information can only help to make the presentation better and more audience oriented.
There are various synonyms used for the Audience Response System (ARS). It also called the Group Response System (GRS) or the Classroom Performance System (CPS). An ARS is essentially an interactive response system that relives the audiences of the pain of raising their hands for hours and shouting on top of the voice to either give a feedback or get selected. Some of the highly sophisticated electronic voting systems are used in television quizzes such as “Who Wants to be a Millionaire – ask the audience” shows and other programs. Now the audience can simply sit in their places and select the answer which they feel is right and press the respective key and the answer is registered through a voting system. The answer is sent to a base station through a centralized system. The data is collected here and the consolidated data is graphically presented to the users. Then the data is available to the presenter or the speaker as per his/her requirements. All thanks to the audience response system which rules out any confusion in the data processing.
There are three technologies used to collect and send the data to the base station: Infrared, Radio frequency and Browser Based systems. Let's see what these three technologies mean to audience response system.-
- Infrared (IR): This type of interactive response system is applicable for smaller groups of audiences.
- Radio Frequency (RF): Such audience response systems go well with large groups of audiences. In case of RF systems there is no need for line of sight for functioning and hundreds of voters can be accommodated with a single base station.
- Browser Based: Such types of systems are in their budding stages and still need a lot of development to compete with the other audience response system.
There are many advantages of using the audience response system for presentations such as it eliminates the chaos of hand raising and shouting, it leads to increased awareness and spreading of knowledge, the results can be reviewed in real time and it allows reports to be made any time from the data available. With the help of the interactive response system any presentation can be made interesting as the audience is always the active participant thus making the event more enjoyable for all parties involved.
