Project Description
For many years, the Justice Research Group has foreshadowed the emergence of a distributed courtroom where more than one party can participate seamlessly via video conference link. In June 2015, Hanson Associates (through ICE Design) in partnership with Cisco Systems built a distributed courtroom model and demonstrated a mock hearing to an international conference of 300+ judicial administrators, judges, architects and others in the Supreme Court of Queensland – in this instance three separate courtrooms were interlinked to host judge, defence, witness and prosecution with public interspersed between the three locations.
Using a “theatre in the round” approach to room design, the relative positions of cameras to displays and comfortable sightlines for all participants allowed natural and intimate communication (simulating eye contact and acoustic localisation) to be successfully achieved between multiple remote parties.
