Education and demonstration – Question or problem eliciting response – Response of plural examinees communicated to monitor or...
Patent
1992-05-29
1995-09-26
Cheng, Joe H.
Education and demonstration
Question or problem eliciting response
Response of plural examinees communicated to monitor or...
434307R, 434323, 434362, 3644192, 348 2, 455 2, 379 96, G09B 300
Patent
active
054530156
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
TECHNICAL FIELD
The present invention relates to methods of, and means for recording and collecting responses of audiences to events being experienced.
BACKGROUND ART
Audience response gathering systems provide schemes for gathering and analysing responses by individual members of an audience. An example of such an application is a quiz show or contest where questions are asked, and players in the audience must respond by answering the questions. In most such contests players are required to answer within a specified time. Another example is a competition whereby the spectators of a sporting event predict the course of play, for example by responding at the end of each over of a cricket match by estimating the number of runs the next batsman will score.
The audience from which responses are gathered need not be located at the site of the event. For example, the audience could be a television audience spread over a whole country, or even world-wide. In the case of television audiences, the participation of viewers has to date been mostly limited to passive observation. To make the medium more effective, entertaining and educational, it has been observed that it is desirable to provide the opportunity for viewers to respond actively to programmes. Some attempts have been made to provide such interaction, but with only minimal success. The simplest means of viewer participation is by mail or telephone response, for example by inviting viewers to write letters or to phone specified numbers to register their opinion such as when voting for parties of a political debate. While these methods are simple and inexpensive, they lack immediacy, limiting their usefulness and appeal. For example, in the case of quiz shows it may be desirable to allow viewers to compete. To achieve this effectively, viewers' responses must preferably be recorded in such a way that the time taken to respond can be taken into account in judging the winner. Postal response is not suited for this as it is easy for competitors to cheat by recording the programme and researching questions at their leisure. Telephone response is more immediate but can cater for only a limited number of players. A number of interactive television systems have been proposed for allowing immediate response using communications from viewers' homes to central recording stations. Such systems suffer the limitation that the viewer's terminal, the communication system and recording stations must be complex and expensive. Another limitation inherent to such systems is that the number of simultaneous participants is limited by the bandwidth of the communications channel or other related technical constraints. Given that television audiences typically number many millions, only a small percentage can be accommodated using these techniques. These factors have severely limited the implementation of interactive television. Attempts have been made to provide systems of viewer response which do not require a return communication channel. One such system, described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,745,468 of Von Kohorn, uses a response comparator which receives response criteria from a broadcast signal and compares it to responses entered by a viewer at a keyboard. If the responses are correct, a card dispenser at the receiving station issues a card which can be used as a discount token, redeemed as cash or as some other form of reward. While this system is useful in some applications, viewers can cheat, for example by using a device capable of delaying the response criteria signal being received at the receiving station, thus allowing a greater time period in which to respond to questions. In cases where it is desired to collect scores at a central station, Von Kohorn's system uses printed cards or magnetic cards dispensed at the viewer's home as the score recording means. The apparatus required for this purpose is complex and expensive.
A further limitation of Von Kohorn's proposal is that if a keyboard is used for entering responses, a degree of special skill on the part of the user i
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