Very cool “multi-touch” screen technology. Watch the Quicktime video.
“While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Such sensing devices are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops.”
Posted by Robert Befus at 4:53 PM .
Click here to comment »
I asked the founder of PixelCorps, Alex Lindsay, what his organization uses to create their very personal and useful software tutorials.
Snapz Pro X 2 allows you to effortlessly record anything on your screen, saving it as a QuickTime® movie or screenshot that can be emailed, put up on the web, or passed around however you please.
This easy software package costs $69. Upgrades from Snapz Pro X 1.0 w/ movie capture are $20.
Great for making a static screenshot with automatic drop shadow or size perimeters; creating a movie is just as easy. Fantastic for on-line tutorials that feel natural and unscripted.Download a free demo version from our web site today or check out the demo movies we’ve created and see for yourself.
Posted by Peter Durand at 11:53 PM .
Click here to comment »
[Thanks to Jason Simmons of GradientLabs, who sent in this site in an email titled, "Yowza!"]
If Edward Tufte is the master teacher of visualizing data, then VisualComplexity.com is the treasure trove of data-driven visuals.
"Complexity is a challenge by itself," writes Portugal native, Manuel Lima. This project to map the maps that illuminate intricate networks has grown out of Manuel’s work at the Design+Technology program at Parsons School of Design, where he earned an MFA.
Currently working as an interaction designer at R/GA Interactive, Lima has created VisualComplexity as an integrated and extensive resource on the topic.
However, it often looks more like an exquisite butterfly collection. The resulting gallery of images is a powerful–and beautiful–filter through which one can see the invisible webs that connect the systems we depend upon: the biological, the cosmic, the financial, the social.
"Complex Networks are everywhere. It is a structural and organizational principle that reaches almost every field we can think of, from genes to power systems, from food webs to market shares."
Posted by Peter Durand at 11:45 PM .
Click here to comment »
Those of you who missed the webinar can get a summary of many of the points I made about why video doesn’t play at my InformIT column. There is also more info on the PFCMedia tool for avoiding problems with codecs.
Posted by Tom Bunzel at 12:48 PM .
1 Comment »
I just read a fascinating article I think has far-reaching implications for presentation professionals. It’s put out by Educause, a large educational organization. The article name is “Is It Age or IT”.
The article’s intent is to summarize numerous studies about how technology is changing the way we learn and communicate. Findings particularly relevant to presenters…
Technology-savy people:
1) are becoming fluent visual communicators–they expect visuals to be a normal part of their communication and learning experience
2) crave interactivity, both with instructors and with peers–and they become bored easily without it
3) have attention spans that can jump quickly between multiple simultaneous tasks
4) operate seamlessly between physical and virtual reality–a virtual experience can be just as meaningful and influential as an actual physical event
5) prefer discovery over being told–in other words they want to learn by doing rather than listening to a lecture
The implications for presenters are obvious: if we keep designing and delivering linear, bullet-ridden, text-based slide shows, we are completely missing the mark with what a growing number of audience members are experiencing in their daily lives. If we want to persuade and otherwise reach into their minds, we better start making our presentations more meaningfully visual, interactive, and hands-on.
Posted by Robert Lane at 9:37 PM .
3 Comments »
We would like to invite all of our readers to visit Speaker Ready - a virtual meeting space (chat room) for presentation professionals.
When Ray and I began Visual Being, we were aiming to create a community of presentation professionals built around the sharing of experience and knowledge. It’s in the nature of our profession that many of us work in isolation, lacking regular communication with a shared community of practice. Some of us are freelancers working in sole practitioner environments. Some of us work in the corporate world where no one else in the company does what we do. The bottom line is that almost everyone can benefit from more contact with his or her professional peers and Visual Being hopes to make getting that contact a little easier.
Speaker Ready takes the next step towards reaching that goal by making the opportunities for interaction more immediate and, well, interactive. Think of it as an online water cooler. We hope you will stop by and check it out the next time you are taking a break or at the end of a long day of overpowering PowerPoint. As of right now, we can’t guarantee that there will always be something going on in there. However, if all goes according to plan, that’s how it will be in the near future. In the meantime, we are in the process of setting up a schedule of regular (weekly?) sessions, so feel free to let us know what times and topics will work for you.
Posted by Lee Potts at 7:59 PM .
Click here to comment »
Quote from The CreativeForum.com Website which is a very good description of what I do; be it content or design or both… so am I a graphic designer, a presentation professional, a graphic technician, are we one in the same or are Graphic Designers et.al. sub-sets of Presentation Professionals? In my past life I was a Visual Communication Designer, presently I’m a Graphic Tech; yet I do the same thing! How do you define your role in the Presentations Industry?
Here’s the quote, you should check out their posts and site…
“From my point-of-view, graphic design, in its basic form, it the blending of words, images, color, tone, line, etc. to communicate a message. Beyond this is the ability of the design to reach the audience on an emotional level that generates a response. That response can be to purchase a product, learn something, make a donation, change their viewpoint, or other actions.
I don’t believe graphic design is art, although they share some common characteristics. I see art as the personal expression of the artist’s ideas and emotions. Graphic design, on the other hand, is the expression and communication of the client’s ideas. Designers put a lot of themselves into their work - their style and experience - but the goal should be the memorable communication of the client’s message.
Before we were graphic designers, we were called commercial artists. It’s ironic, but the Master of Fine Art like DaVinci and Michaelangelo were the commercial artists of their day. Their Patrons dictated much of the work - their message, not necessarily the artist’s. So, who knows, maybe some of you will be the Masters of Fine Art in the future. But, for today we still need to meet the project goals, within budget, on schedule and generate some results for our Patrons.”
Posted by Mary Waldera at 10:36 PM .
Click here to comment »
For a first post this is slightly historical, but I wanted to share this clip of how our recent UK election results from May 5 were broadcast by the BBC. I was entertained and impressed by both the technology and the presentation.
For a little bit of background: Peter Snow, the presenter in the BBC video clip linked below, has been forecasting and broadcasting election results for as long as I can remember. He has always been known for his innovative presentation style, adopting visual aids that have since entered into the national consciousness. He will always be associated with the ‘Swingometer’, a device co-invented by David Butler and the Canadian broadcaster Professor Robert McKenzie and first used in the BBC television broadcast of the 1955 General Election in the UK. Then it was a piece of cardboard propped up on a desk against a semicircular scale and was manually adjusted to indicate the changing fortunes of each political party as results came in.
It was ideally suited to indicate trends in a two-party battle but was not so good once other political parties began to increase their share of the votes. Now the Swingometer has entered the virtual, multi-dimensional age. Spare a few moments to watch the video of the results linked below.
Unfortunately I can’t give a direct link due to the way that the BBC embeds their news player into their web site. Visit this BBC page, and select the button top right ‘Election News in Video’. In the window that pops up, select ‘Results explained: Peter Snow analyses the election outcome’ in the Special Coverage section, bottom left corner. Stay with it, as it gets more theatrical as it progresses and do view it full screen - but make haste, it may not be posted in this way for long.
Does all this visual technology make the results any easier to interpret? Well, the entertainment value is high and it compresses a lot of data into a short visual experience - ideally suited to those of us that sat up all night watching through a caffeine-supported stupor. In the past the Swingometer was wildly inaccurate in its predictions. In 2005 however it proved to be a pretty accurate measure of the final outcome.
There is also a Flash on-line version of the Swingometer (illustrated), complete with an introduction by the inimitable Peter Snow.
Posted by Roy Hammans at 8:21 AM .
Click here to comment »
I might be late to the party with this one but my boss introduced me to The Wainhouse Research Bulletin the other day and it seemed worth sharing.
The goal of The Wainhouse Research Bulletin (WRB) is to help vendors, reseller channel partners, service providers, investors, and end-users alike follow the fast moving action in the world of rich media communications. Wainhouse Research analysts cover presence, instant messaging, audio conferencing, web conferencing, videoconferencing, distance education, streaming media, and unified communications products and services. Via the WRB, we both report and give our unique perspectives on product announcements, financial results, and corporate developments as well as technology and market trends. The WRB is published approximately weekly via email.
There’s also an RSS syndication feed available.
Posted by Lee Potts at 9:13 PM .
Click here to comment »
This is fascinating stuff. Will we someday be able to fill a PPT object with a “spatio-temporal gradient”? I sure hope so. Check out the video on the Khronos Projector site linked below.
KHRONOS PROJECTOR - Alvaro Cassinelli
The Khronos Projector is an interactive-art installation allowing people to explore pre-recorded movie content in an entirely new way. A classic video-tape allows a simple control of the reproducing process (stop, backward, forward, and elementary control on the reproduction speed). Modern digital players add little more than the possibility to perform random temporal jumps between image frames. The goal of the Khronos Projector is to go beyond these forms of exclusive temporal control, by giving the user an entirely new dimension to play with: by touching the projection screen, the user is able to send parts of the image forward or backwards in time.
(via Boing Boing)
Posted by Robert Befus at 1:12 PM .
Click here to comment »
EurekAlert reports on visual information processing research taking place at Kansas State University. Apparently all those scrolling screens and news tickers that have become very fashionable on TV news broadcasts actually decrease a viewer’s ability to process information.
We discovered that when you have all of this stuff on the screen, people tend to remember about 10 percent fewer facts than when you don’t have it on the screen,” Grimes said. “Everything you see on the screen — the crawls, the anchor person, sports scores, weather forecast — are conflicting bits of information that don’t hang together semantically. They make it more difficult to attend to what is the central message. … The human brain is today as it was in the 1880s, the 1580s and in the time of the Greeks and Romans. It has not changed. We are no better able to parallel process conflicting information now than we were 300 years ago.
These techniques migrated to the news outlets after having much better success on MTV. As the MTV generation makes it’s climb up the corporate ladder, we are seeing an increased call to adopt techniques like these to presentation formats that would traditional be more static. Although the conclusions reached in this study are not completely surprising, they serve to remind us that the audience and the message must be the most important considerations in every decision regarding every element placed on the screen.
An article based on this research is slated to be published in the July issue of Human Communication Research.
Posted by Lee Potts at 1:48 PM .
1 Comment »
Last year during an ICIA Presentations Council Webinar, I introduced attendees to There…a virtual world for chatting, playing and spending (real) money.
At the time, I suggested that in the not too distant future there would be 3D virtual meeting spaces. There are now several available. After getting demos, I found Workspace 3D the most interesting.
Posted by Robert Befus at 9:15 AM .
2 Comments »
Now it can be told and revealed. Check my story on InformIT for the full details of Microsoft PowerPoint Secedes from MS Office. Suffice it to say that this is huge, HUGE, HUGE — only my sources in the PowerPoint community let me reveal the sordid underbelly of what has been festering in Redmond. Here’s a hint — check the package of the next version of Office and guess what WON’T be there. Read it all now! (It’s all there with the full final slide show from the PowerPoint team).
Posted by Tom Bunzel at 5:05 PM .
3 Comments »
Why should the speakers be the only one to use the laser pointer?
As often happens, Google lead me to an interesting item that had very little, if anything, to do with what I was originally looking for. This article (PDF), described a method for combining a laser pointer, a web camera, and some programming skills, into a system that allows meeting participants to interact, from a distance, with what’s being displayed on the screen. Although interesting in and of itself, it got me thinking that there must be other, slightly less technically advanced ways to use laser pointers in meetings.
For instance, what if you were holding a meeting where it was necessary to quickly get a sense of a group’s opinions about a series of issues. You could do a seemingly endless series of hand votes: "All right, on question six, please raise your hand if you agree strongly that we should pursue this opportunity. Now raise you hand if you feel we should pursue the opportunity, but don’t agree strongly…"
You get the idea.
What if you were to draw some squares on the white board, or have flip charts arrayed across the front of the room, each labeled with an answer to the questions you’re posing (i.e., agree strongly, agree, yes, no, etc.). Give each participant a laser pointer and have them point to the square or the flip chart that corresponds to their answer. You would then have an extremely interactive and graphically concise representation of which way the vote went.
Although there are some drawbacks to this method that I’ll get to in a minute, there is a lot that would be cool about it. First, it takes what is usually a sequential, option-by-option process and makes it simultaneous. This, of course, speeds things up, but it might also help groups reach consensus because everyone sees which way the group is leaning in real time. Second, it’s a way to take a vote in public, where everybody can see the group’s sentiments, while letting each voter stay relatively anonymous. I haven’t tested this yet, but I’m willing to bet that if you used small key fob laser pointers and positioned the voting squares close together, it will be hard to determine which point of light is coming from which pointer. The third cool aspect of this method is that the novelty might help an audience get more involved in the proceedings than they might otherwise be.
As I said there are at least a few drawbacks to using this method. For openers, it’s not terribly precise. I don’t think there’s any way to get a quick, exact count of who was voting for what, especially in a large group setting. This is obviously best used as a way to get an overall sense of how many members of an audience are voting for what. It will also be difficult if not impossible to generate a permanent record of the proceedings. It might be possible to snap a quick digital picture of each vote but that seems to go against the ephemeral, quick and dirty nature inherent to this method. The other negatives are mainly those you would have whenever you are trying to do anything with a small, very bight, highly focused light source. In certain environments, it might be difficult for everyone to have a clear shot at the square they are aiming at due to architectural features of the meeting space or other attendees getting in the way. In this setting it will also be a lot easier to accidentally to laser someone’s eye. I imagine it’s the moderator who is in the most danger.
In retrospect, this seems like one of those ideas that might have been really obvious to everyone else, and it’s either been done before or is dismissed as impractical by those with more experience. If you have ever participated in or ran a meeting that used a technique like this, please share your experiences with the rest of us in the comments section. I’d also like to hear about any other novel ways laser pointers have been used in presentations.
Posted by Lee Potts at 12:01 AM .
1 Comment »
