Menlo Park, California, USA – December 21, 2011. Pacific Media Associates (PMA), the worldwide market information experts on front projectors, have released their findings on interactive technology used in conjunction with front projectors.

This is the second set of important results from their sixth biennial large-scale (1000 responses) and statistically-representative survey of United States users and intenders of front projectors, both individual consumers and organizations. The survey focused on  topics of timely interest, including requests for additional or modified questions from PMA’s extensive client base of front projector manufacturers. K-12 education is the largest and most rapidly-growing vertical market for front projectors today. So Pacific Media Associates’ 2011 End User Survey separated K-12 teachers from all other organizational users, and analyzed the answers separately.

“Interactivity is the hottest topic related to projectors for K-12 education. The leading manufacturers are vying to supply a variety of systems allowing teachers—and students—to interact with course content,” says Dr. William Coggshall, President of PMA. “Whenever interactive software and course content is stored in a computer with an attached projector, the teacher can keep students’ attention focused on the subject and improve the educational experience. Interactivity can be produced by a variety of means. To date the most popular approach has used interactive whiteboards. But these are being strongly challenged by projectors with built-in interactivity, separate accessories with embedded interactivity, and tablets/slates.”

PMA’s survey data for K-12 included the numbers for classrooms currently served by projectors and the fraction of those projector installations that had interactivity of some form. It also confirmed that K-12 teachers place a high value on interactivity for their future purchases, as 79% said that interactivity was “an absolute must” or “very important” in choosing their next classroom projector.

For organizations other than K-12 schools, PMA’s 2011 End User Survey also found considerable interest in interactivity, though the numbers were somewhat lower than for K-12 schools. 68% of these organizations said that interactivity was “an absolute must” or “very important” in choosing their next projector. Of even greater interest was that these users placed a high level of importance on multi-person interactivity, and a lower, though notable, level of importance on having remote connections.

About Pacific Media Associates

Pacific Media specializes in worldwide front projector market information, including New Era (sub-500 lumens), Mainstream (500 4999 lumens), and High-End (5000+ lumens) categories. Their Industry Service family of publications provides detailed worldwide quarterly updates (sell-in data and forecasts) on front projector markets, newsletters on new products and other key industry developments, and biennial Web surveys of North American dealers and end users (including organizations and individual consumers). Their Tracking Service family of monthly reports offers timely sell-through data and analysis on unit sales, true volume-weighted street prices, and inventories of front projectors sold by leading North American retailers, resellers, and distributors. Pacific Media Associates was established by Dr. William Coggshall, who was a co founder of Dataquest (now part of Gartner) and helped start the syndicated high-tech market information business. The company headquarters is at 1060 Siskiyou Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025. Telephone +1 650-561-9020 www.pacificmediaassociates.com