Education & Distance Learning Enthusiasts- ROM, AT&T team up on distance learning program

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ROM, AT&T team up on distance learning program - Royal Ontario Museum

Computing Canada - February 15, 1995

TORONTO -- A five-minute Egyptian history lesson taught by the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) to a roomful of people 1,300 kilometres away marked the launch of a new long-distance learning program pioneered by the ROM and sponsored by AT&T Canada.

"Can you see it?" asks ROM teacher Jackie Breton into the AT&T Picasso Still-Image phone, while a map of ancient Egypt is displayed on a television monitor at the museum in Toronto.

"We can see it just fine," answers a voice at the Thunder Bay Historical Museum in Thunder Bay, Ont. "I can't believe how clear the image is."

The image of the map was sent using the Picasso, an analogue phone that allows a user to talk and send full-color, high-quality still images over an ordinary telephone line to another Picasso phone.

It works on the same principle as a fax machine, except the images sent are digitized, and thus much clearer.

AT&T has donated 10 Picasso Still-Image Phones to the museum for its Picasso Distance Education Program, enabling the ROM to communicate interactively with people who don't have access to the museum's collections.

"For us, the Picasso was a godsend as a technology," says David Rinaldo, manager of the ROM's Outreach Services department.

"We wanted a system that was user-friendly and that down the road would be used to further advance computer skills. The Picasso will enable us to do that."

The Picasso phone, says Ken Barr, managing director, AT&T Global Business Communications Systems, "is not hardware or software. These are just basic telephones."

Images can be retrieved from very standard equipment - for example, color slides, photographs, a camcorder, a photo compact disk player, electronic camera, a document scanner - and sent with the push of a single button.

Images are viewed on the other end by a television or personal computer monitor. Total transmission time is from five to 40 seconds, and the costs are the same as a regular phone call. The Picasso has a 32-image memory storage, which can be displayed on a monitor in "postage stamp" sizes. An unlimited number of images can be stored on a PC hard disk or on a floppy disk.

Aside from its program with the ROM, AT&T hopes to attract other lines of business to its phones, namely health care, advertising and police, among others.

The phones, which list for $4,500, are "eliminating geographic distances between people," says Barr.

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