Microsoft’s interactive presentations

Microsoft Office 2007 presentation at CeBIT 2007
Photo credit: Hassan Sami Adnan

If you like Minority Report style interfaces, then quickly go to the toilet and come back. Microsoft has again raised the bar of innovation in presentations to a whole new level. Building on the foundations of interactive presentation solutions provided by Ventuz solutions and their previous experiences at CeBIT, Microsoft showed off their concept for the future of interactive presentations at the 2007 CeBIT exhibition in Germany.

In this presentation for Office 2007, the presenter uses a giant touch-sensitive display to navigate between ‘chapters’ of the presentation, and then uses the motion of her hand to control the progress of the slides itself. Apart from touch and motion, the system is also capable of detecting distance, weight, heat and sound, according to the Ventuz website.

Here’s a pretty low-resolution movie I found of the presentation on YouTube. Understanding German is a plus. If anyone knows of a higher-resolution capture of this presentation, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

How cool is that giant Office orb that she can ‘push’ to turn to the next slide?

12 insightful thoughts

  1. You know, I don’t think the big screen is interactive in any way. The side-screen is, but the big screen doesn’t appear to be. I think the entire thing is just very well rehearsed. The arc above the Office icon looks to be a progress meter as a visual indicator.

    Why? Mainly because she is moving her arms around so much in close proximity to the screen that I’d think the system would have a hard time telling what she wanted to do.

    There’s another issue with this as well. She’s obscuring a fair amount of the screen by standing directly in front of it, and that’s usually a bad thing.

  2. Ventuz is pretty cool, yes.

    marlone: it’s not a PowerPoint. Far more advanced (and quite a bit harder to use).

  3. oh… now showing at a lecture theater near you: death by powerpoint – advanced.

    just having interactivity doesn’t make for a better presentation. In other words this is simply a gimmick.

    Do yourself a favor and read Edward Tufte’s “The Cognitive Style of Power Point” and you’ll know what I mean.

    Powerpoint bad hmkay…

  4. Actually the big screen was interactive too. There were 16 light barriers mounted an conntected to Ventuz to ‘turn’ the wheel! Two Ventuz machines were interacting together using OSC (Open Sound Control). The presentation was controllable by the 50″ touch screen (Panasonic plasma) AND the back projected big screen using the light barriers. The complete show was controlled by the speakers them selfs. No fake! This idea was developed by our client Second Unit Services. They just used the available tool set of Ventuz to achieve that great show!

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