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Editor's HDTV Pick

HP 47 inch MediaSmart 1080p LCD HDTV "Out of the box" digital media platform. Enjoy videos, pictures and music from home network + digital media delivered over your broadband Internet connection + 3 x HDMI

We all know that your presentation shouldn’t all be all about how many animations and effects you can cram into your PowerPoint slides. Yet, your presentation slides should look professional for your business credibility. However, spending an inordinate amount of time creating something special is not a realistic approach. Using some professionally produced tools, themes and templates is an ideal approach. It’s a way to make it look like you’ve had a graphic artist working hard to create professionally designed slides when you have really achieved the effect with little effort.
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Technorati Tags: PowerPoint

Photosynth is an impressive software application developed by Microsoft Live Labs. It takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a three-dimensional framework. The software is in effect discovering hyperlinks between images based on unique features within them.

Photosynth enables users to:

• Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
• Smoothly zoom in or out of a photo irrespective of its size.
• Identify where pictures were taken in relation to one another.

Computer vision algorithms encoded in the software process each photo to extract distinctive features for example, the corner of a window frame or a door. Photos are then linked together using shared distinctive features as a guide. 3D positioning of features can be calculated when the same feature is found in multiple images. In addition, Photosynth can figure out where all of the cameras would have to have been and which way they were aimed.

Objects analyzed by Photosynth appear as a 3D point cloud with the original pictures overlaid on the model. Microsoft suggest that one imagines it as slide projector placed at each original camera position, aimed how the camera was, and projecting the picture that camera took. A screen is placed in the 3D environment at an appropriate distance from the projector. When moving around a Photosynth 3D model “projectors” turn on and off, giving virtual reconstruction of a subject built entirely out of the original photos.

The very nature of Photosynth makes it difficult to describe in words, so have a look at the presentation below made by Blaise Aguera at the March 2007 TED conference. You can also download a demonstration version of Photosynth from Microsoft.

There are some very powerful presentation software packages available however, their sophistication can distract some presenters from considering some of the basic concepts for preparing a successful presentation.

1. Plan your presentation – it’s the only path to a successful presentation - presentations thrown together at the last minute betray their author quickly
2. Consider the purpose of the presentation - note what key points an audience should leave with
3. Consider the audience - tailor your presentation to their needs and preferences
4. Research - your topic thoroughly using a range of authoratative sources
5. Cull your research - until you reach a reasonable size presentation that covers the main points you want to convey Don’t put your audience into information overload.
6. Logical progression – arrange your content so that follows a logical sequence and doesn’t wander off topic
7. Ensure main keypoints are sufficently supported have the necessary facts, statistics, graphs and references
8. Edit the presentation - until it’s a reference for your talk rather than your entire script. Avoid full sentences and use bullet points
9. Consider handouts - if you have any sections which are detailed yet important to convey. Remember to inform your audience that you will be providing handouts after the presentation
10. Continuity is essential – it’s what makes a document, web page or presentation look professional
11. A reasonably sized, consistent color pallette - looks good
12. Use an “easy to read” font style – eg. Arial or Verdana and avoid script like fonts
13. Have a suitably large font size - the audience in the back row needs to read the slides too (try 18 to 24pt to start)
14. Use the same style - for images, graphs and diagrams
15. Purchase a template if you’re not skilled - at producing an attractive, professional slide template
16. Purchase photos if you can’t take a good picture – visit an image gallery and purchase some professional images
17. Avoid heavily patterned or textured backgrounds - they make text hard to read
18. Learn to love white space – it makes your text easier to read and limits the amount of text on each slide
19. Select high contrast text and background colors - for easy reading
20. Avoid using animation – it’s distracting and in most cases unnecessary
21. Don’t overuse slide transitions - stick to one or a small number
22. Practice and time the presentation delivery – watch a video of yourself doing it as painful as it might seem
23. Check the equipment works – before the presentation check the equipment you will use and if it is your equipment cary spares
24. Have a bright projector – if you have a projector with 2,000 lumens brightness you will never have to worry about whether the room will be too bright
25. Face the audience, not to the screen - if nerves are an issue scan above the back row
26. Forget Comedy - unless experienced

One presenter who can successfully use comedy is stand-up comedian Don McMillian who’s a specialist corporate event commedian. In the following YouTube video “Life after Death by Powerpoint” Don uses comedy to empahasise some very important points about what not to do with a Powerpoint presentation. Visit Don’s site technicallyfunny.com to learn more about his work.

According to John Sweller, of the University of New South Wales School of Education, we are being taught the wrong way as teaching methods do not take into account the way in which we think and learn. The basis for John Sweller’s assertion is his Cognitive Load Theory which was the subject of a recent, March 2007, international conference in Sydney, Australia.

The central premise of the theory is the limitations of the brain’s temporary storage of information necessary to perform complex cognitive tasks such as language, mathematics, learning and reasoning.

Working memory, which utilizes our limited temporary storage, is limited when we are learning new information. Learning and solving problems require different cognitive process which compete for temporary storage. Similarly, visual and auditory processing require different cognitive processing. Splitting a students attention between verbalized and PowerPoint presentations of the same content overtaxes short term memory - hindering learning.

Mr Sweller believes that teachers are better off giving students solved problems so they have the learning to take home. Once information is in long-term memory, it can be brought back to working memory in very large amounts.

The take home message is that teaching content and style, including integration of PowerPoint presentations, should be tailored to take account of the brains processing limitations in order to make it much easier to understand.

Have we stepped closer to a world where you can open any office document with a number of competing software applications without encountering any annoying compatibility problems?

A step closer maybe but, we are not there yet. Microsoft has announced the Open XML Translator project to be located on Sourceforge which will create tools to build a technical bridge between the Microsoft Office Open XML Formats and the OpenDocument Format (ODF) commonly used by applications such as StarOffice by Sun Microsystems or the free, open source Open Office.

There has been recent Government pressure for open document standards. Belgium has adopted a proposal that all federal government agencies ensure that they can receive and read ODF documents by September 2007. This follows similar a recent similar move by Massachusetts (USA) with France and Denmark rumored to be considering similar initiatives.

Likely to benefit from this progress will be Impress , recently covered by Presentation Technology Reviews, the free OpenOffice application for developing presentation slides.

Impress is the multimedia presentation program, similar to Microsoft PowerPoint, part of the free Open Office suite by OpenOffice.org.

Open Office also contains; Writer (word processor), Calc (spreadsheet), Draw (graphics creation) and Base (Databases). Open Office was developed by Sun Microsystems and has the same base code as its complimentary office suite – Star Office 8.

Star Office has some improvements over Open Office:

• A dozen extra English language fonts making it easier to import Microsoft Word documents into Writer;
• Star Office comes with more clip art, sample documents and template documents;
• The dictionary and thesaurus in Star Office 8 are slightly better;
• More comprehensive support compared to basic web based resources for Open Office.

These differences aside Open Office is still a powerful package and has some advantages worth considering:

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