Interdisciplinary Development of an Electronic Class and Conference Room

This paper reports on the design and development of an electronic classroom and conference room which was opened in the city of Linz, Austria, in late 1996. This room was developed in a multidisciplinary approach and contains several unique features. After an introduction about the background, rationale for merging the concepts of classroom and conference room, and an overview about the four layers of the logical architecture, the paper emphasizes issues associated with the facilities installed. Then the attention is drawn upon a “consumables” layer which we propose to insert between such facilities and the usual software tools. A brief overview of the tools and contents layers completes the description.