Microsoft is continually exploring innovation in the area of presentations and you may have seen Bill Gates show the TouchWall / Plex demo, a recent example of this work. I had the same reaction as you the first time I that demo, “hey I want it, when can I get Plex?” I know for us, the first time I Plex, we thought it was really cool and we wanted to create presentations like that! That’s the benefit of our job, we get the chance to play with innovative technology and we’re exploring ways to share it with you as well.
It turns out the Plex presentations shown for the TouchWall were custom created by a few designers and software developers on the Office Labs Envisioning team. If I to make a Plex presentation myself, it would have required quite a bit of technical and design skill, along with a lot of time for each individual presentation.
I’t have that kind of time, and much like you, the vast majority of our presentations are in Microsoft Office PowerPoint. I wanted to see if we could create something that allowed me quickly make Plex-like presentations using PowerPoint.
With the Wii controller you can flick your hand to go to the next and previous slide. You can point to the screen and navigate to any slide out of order. If you reach a section and don’t want to go into its details you can use another motion to bypass that whole section.
Controlling pptPlex using a 3D camera
I recently learned that Microsoft Research was experimenting with 3D cameras, and I thought it was worth seeing if a 3D camera could be used to control a presentation.
3D cameras are still in the prototype stage and are hard to come by, and until they become mainstream this was just an experiment. However, it’s interesting to think about what the future may bring.
Touch version of pptPlex
Click here to download, see and discover more cool features about pptPlex
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment