Wanganui Collegiate the first school in New Zealand to implement Vivi screen mirroring technology

Put your hand up if you have never heard of Vivi.

I had never heard of it, but Wanganui Collegiate School started term four with a Vivi device in every classroom.

Vivi is wireless screen mirroring technology. A blue Vivi unit is attached to a projector and fed information wirelessly from a device, before transcoding it and presenting it on-screen.

Wanganui Collegiate School IT manager Rob Crawley said Vivi is like Apple TV, but geared for education. Collegiate previously had difficulties using Apple TV in classrooms.

From the back of the classroom, Wanganui Collegiate School teacher Chris Buckley is projecting a presentation to a screen at the front through Vivi. Photo / Stuart Munro

"Apple TV is designed for home users, so it has one or two devices connecting to it and streaming," Crawley said.

"We had difficulties with multiple projections at once as we had 50 classrooms trying to stream to Apple units and they're not designed for that."

Students would constantly have issues where the audio ran behind the video during presentations, putting everything out of sync and causing glitches.

Vivi was optimised to present media. Australian Dr Lior Rauchberger was approached by a client in 2013 who asked him to recommend a quality wireless presentation solution.

When he researched what was on the market, Rauchberger was underwhelmed, so he partnered with Simon Holland and Tomas Spacek to create their own solution.

In February 2016, Vivi launched.

"It means teachers can walk around the classroom and present on the fly along with the students as well," Crawley said.

"It is so easy. We installed it over the holidays and I arranged for a professional development session with all the teachers so we could show them how to use it.

"We've been running it for a fortnight now and nobody's come and asked for help .. 97 per cent of teachers used it last week and we didn't get a single request for help."

Crawley became interested in Vivi when Wanganui Collegiate School headmaster Wayne Brown mentioned it to him.

Brown saw it in use at Hutchins School in Tasmania.

"I contacted Vivi who sent over a trial unit for us, but they didn't have the features that we wanted, so we negotiated with them," Crawley said.

"Within four months they'd implemented all the features on the unit and shipped it back to us."

Vivi also has an annotation feature, allowing the user to draw on screen, which will then be projected to the board.

Students can snapshot their image, store it on their local computers, modify it and then present it back to the class.

The device is constantly being developed and in future the school will integrate it to display the nearest exits when a fire alarm goes off.

Crawley has already been contacted by other schools that have experienced similar problems to Collegiate and expects they won't be the only school to implement Vivi.