Design and Implementation of an Audience Response System for Smart Mobile Devices

Interaction in presentations between speakers and participants is becoming more and more important. Whether it is about controlling a learning progress or just for making a survey about a special issue, good communication is paramount. Nowadays, where time is an expensive resource, it is important that voting is time-efficient and the results are presented in real-time. In this thesis the objectives were to design and implement an audience response system (ARS). Therefore, a pre-existing ARS was analyzed to determine what critical components were required for creation of a project specific ARS that was developed in this thesis. Through use of a sophisticated software architecture a prototype ARS was implemented. The prototype provided a seamless integration into the presentation software Mircosoft PowerPoint through an custom extension called an add-in. Furthermore, support for use by third-party applications was provided through specific APIs. The ARS server is a web application and uses an android client as voting device. Moreover the architecture of the system allows it to be extended in various ways beyond this thesis. The communication between the components is realized with HTTP and the payload is based on JSON. A highly flexible and customizable framework was used to ensure the prototype is highly scalable and expandable on both the server as well as the client side. In its entirety the developed prototype provides a complete environment for creating, presenting and evaluating interactive presentations.