Archive for category Online presentations
Augmented reality in events
Posted by Steve Wylie in Live vision systems, Online presentations, Presentation IT on July 29, 2009
There are some great examples of augmented reality concepts out there right now – basically interactions between physical actions (e.g. touch, sight, or sound), and virtual responses – for instance, I could point my iPhone at a building, and using the in-built camera, an application could recognise the building, and draw segments over the top, labelling all of the occupants.
This is the sort of stuff we’ve been seeing in high-tech movie scenes since the late 90’s, but it’s finally becoming realistic at a consumer level thanks to devices such as the iPhone which have built in GPS, camera, accelerometer, and magnetometer (so they know where you are, what you’re looking at, from what direction, etc)…
What this means is that we’re starting to see really functional crossovers between real, physical environments, and virtual ones.
I can’t wait to see this start to emerge in the event space.
This could include things like cameras in a venue that automatically recognise known audience members, and greet them on screen by name, or it could extend to allowing the presenter to show a physical document on screen via a camera, and then ‘touch’ a word in the document to ‘hotlink’ it to a PowerPoint presentation or video.
There are a lot of opportunities to showcase the technologies in events which will ‘wow’ the audiences, but I think we will start to see some real, functional purposes starting to emerge over the next few years.
For now, here are a couple of good examples of what’s possible outside the event world -
petitinvention blog: Future of Internet Search
‘petitinvention‘ discusses a concept towards the ‘future of mobile search’ on their blog – these graphics are great concept renders of what is now possible with a device like the iPhone…
BMW UK – Print out a special square and move it around your desk in front of your web-cam to control a BMW Z4 on your computer screen. GE Money has build something similar, sending the visual ‘key’ to clients by mail as marketing collateral – an interesting way to compel customers to visit their website.
Virtual tours are back
Posted by Steve Wylie in Online presentations, Speaker support content on July 1, 2009
QuickTime VR was first released in 1994, but until recently, it seems to have been regarded as beyond the ‘DIY’ capabilities of presenters and content producers.
It seems like Google Earth and Maps are playing a huge part in changing this perception. It’s now becoming pretty common for presenters and content producers to incorporate Google Earth ‘fly-throughs’ either as live demos, or as canned screen captures.
I’ve recently come across an Australian company called Pixelcase, which produces similar results using a Flash-based front end, which makes sense for compatibility.
And it turns out that QuickTime VR still exists, and there are a bunch of tools you can use to create VR shots, including software and hardware-based systems.
Pixelcase Photo from AMP Building
Virtual Events Platforms
Posted by Steve Wylie in Online presentations on June 5, 2009
I’ve noticed both Jack Morton and GPJ talking about virtual events more and more lately.
Jack Morton released their new Virtual Events platform recently, which seems to loosely resemble Second Life, but built as a virtual ‘convention centre’ of sorts. This is an interesting idea – we’ve already seen companies taking advantage of Second Life itself to differentiate their online ‘events’ from the now-traditional webcast/webinar platform, so it makes some sense that a large player like Jack’s have come up with their own solution in-a-box.
GPJ’s Diretor of Digital Experience in the UK, Kevin Aires has been talking a lot about virtual events lately. I think it’s clear that the big players have all seen both the threat that virtual/online poses to live events (to a limited extent) but also the opportunities attached. Interesting times.
Jack Morton Virtual Experience Platform
Use Windows Media Encoder to capture the Windows desktop
Posted by Steve Wylie in Online presentations, Presentation IT, Speaker support content, Video and motion graphics on December 7, 2008
Microsoft’s free Windows Media Encoder is capable of recording the Windows desktop or a specific application, which you can then use to demo an application, website, or process in a visual format – often known as screencasting.
A popular commercial software package, Camtasia, also performs this function, however Windows Media Encoder does a good job, at no cost.
You can download Windows Media Encoder from Microsoft’s website at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/default.mspx.
Once installed, start Windows Media Encoder and choose ‘Capture Screen’. This will launch a wizard which will guide you through the process of choosing your capture settings, including the quality of the file you want to create, and the source to capture – the entire desktop, or a specific application window.
Windows Media Encoder, New Session
If you want more control over the quality and file format settings, you can select not to start the capture at the end of the wizard, which will allow you to customise the configuration further before capturing.
Note that Windows Media Encoder will only capture the screen to Windows Media Video format – which is fine if you want to upload it to the Internet, but you may need to convert it to another format if you need to later edit the capture, or incorporate with another video.
Low Definition video
Posted by Steve Wylie in Online presentations, Video and motion graphics on March 20, 2006
High Definition (HD) video is taking its place in our TV broadcasts, and soon our DVD formats. Standard Definition will still be around for plenty of time due to our love for watching historical and archived material (and networks that save money running repeats).
But until Internet bandwidth demands catch up to the requirements of high quality video, we’ll have to get used to Low Definition video. Interestingly, most web video these days is equal or better quality to the VCDs we produced in yesteryear when it was too impossible to produce our own DVDs.
HD 1920×1080, 1280×720
SD 768×576, 720×480
LD 320×240
Web video publishing standards
Posted by Steve Wylie in Online presentations, Video and motion graphics on March 17, 2006
If we’re going to give consumers the choice of format, device, delivery, and medium, then it will soon (if not already) be apparent that we can’t cater for everyone. If I was to download music from BigPond Music and play it on my iPod through my car stereo, my requirements are very different from someone who wants to listen to a podcast embedded into a weblog without downloading any files.
This is particularly so with video now. You can’t support iPod, PSP, Windows Mobile, embedded web video (e.g. Flash), and HD/SD download, all with high and low bandwidth and all via HTTP, FTP, P2P, etc… What’s more, if you want to apply licensing restrictions to content in all these formats you might as well give up right away.
Basically, we need to change the way we consider distributing video, just as consumers have to change the way they receive video and other web media. We need to distribute one file format, perhaps with varying quality based on bandwidth preferences (it would be great if this could be done at a server level, drawing from one source file), and either require that users employ software to convert the file to their desired format, or again, use server-side technology to transcode it in real-time and deliver it to the user.
So perhaps rather than a “standard video format” that we all seem to be fighting to determine, we should be looking for a protocol for real-time delivery of ANY format.
Flash video codec issues
Posted by Steve Wylie in Online presentations, Video and motion graphics on March 12, 2006
I have been using FLV (Flash video) to publish short video clips to my blog recently. It’s a really user friendly way for viewers to view short clips without having to download plug-ins, load helper applications, or download files and open them in various applications.
There is, however, a down side.
Flash 7 shipped with support for the Sorenson Spark compression codec, while the newer Flash 8 ships with support for Spark, and a newer, far more efficient codec, ON2 VP6. VP6 produces brilliant images in contrast to Spark, and at lower file size to quality ratios; however it’s not supported in older versions of Flash, which many users will still be using.
I’ve also been puzzled lately as a couple of people who I told to download Flash 8 were still unable to view the file (they could hear the audio but not see the video) even after they’d downloaded the new version of Flash player. I’m not entirely sure why this would be the case. Puzzling at this stage.
Above: Screenshot Flash 7 using Sorenson Spark codec
Above: Screenshot Flash 8 using newer ON2 VP6 codec