SpatializedSlides

Spatial Slides

In this model, we rethink the notion of spaces for a presentation. Instead of the presenter and audience staying in a fixed presentation space while screens in that space change, this sketch shows how we might completely re-imagine the relationship between a presentation and the space in which it is presented.

As in a traditional presentation, the audience is shown a series of slides. But instead instead of one slide being visible at a time, the audience sits on a kind of carriage that moves along the path of the slides. The carriage is controlled by the presenter, so by default audience members are looking at the slide the presenter is talking about. Audience members that want to go look at other slides can move off the carriage and explore the past or future of the presentation. When they're done, they can click a "back to the presentation" button to snap back to the carriage.

Audience members could post questions, comments, or suggested resources that would be represented by objects in the environment. Relative to the more 2D backchannel sharing systems, this would more clearly situate the comments in the space of the presentation itself. The presenter would probably have a non-spatial view of these comments and suggestions.

Audience members could also use the organization of the space to get an overview of where to find questions and comments, other people, or interesting conversations among audience members. By moving their camera high above the space they could get a nice top-down visual overview of the presentation. That would probably include thumbnails of slides, as well as the tag-cloud-like visualization above the slides showing what they were each about, based on users' comments, notes, and tags. This top-down view might also be useful for navigation, so you can easily move between slides if you're not moving with the group.

This setup would be federated in the way Jon imagined — everyone would have a copy of the world and would see full avatars of people in their particular world, as well as some abstract representation of other people in the audience. The key ways that audience members interact is through posting objects that get left behind in the space, which is easily federated.

Although in this sketch we assume that the slides are laid out automatically in a line, the vision here is that as presenters get more comfortable with the tools they could build presentations that are really native to this sort of system. Slides could be organized to represent their conceptual narrative, be it spiral, hierarchical, or associative. Slides also need not just be 2D images on the sides of 3D objects, either. The core unit in this model is of a sort of narrative architecture that the presenter takes the audience through, and could consist of any sort of 3D media.