Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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Paul Vlahos is Chairman and CEO of iMatte, an offshoot of Ultimatte, the company that revolutionized drop out backgrounds special effects for movies, and won an Academy Award for its technology. You may remember Ultimatte best as the technique for putting two officers on the foredeck of the Titanic when they were actually in a movie studio, thousands of miles away.

Paul's current pet project is iSkia, which is a piece of hardware that sits on top of any conventional presentation projector (and actually resembles a second projector).

Figure 364

The hardware is set up between the presentation laptop and the projector using the standard VGA connectors.

The first significant thing that iSkia achieves is creating a mask or matte out of the presenter (by having her stand in front of the device and screen, and calibrate various coordinates). Then, by projecting this mask (or matte) in real time during the presentation, the presenter can move inside the presentation image without the image being projected over her body, and without the light from the projector blinding the presenter.

Figure 365

The device uses a conventional Gyro Presenter to set up the mask.

In effect, this puts the presenter inside the show. With the various levels of light and shadow controlled by the remote, it also enables the presenter to maintain eye contact and to engage the audience, while moving around inside the presentation area. The light levels can be refined and controlled. A 30% level is generally optimal in terms of enabling eye contact between the presenter and audience, and blending the image and shadow effectively.

So, this removes the inevitable disconnect between the audience and the presenter (who is standing off to one side while his visuals are projected elsewhere). As Vlahos says, in this scenario the brain of the viewer doesn't know where to focus its attention, and eventually zones out.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg with respect to iSkia (pardon the Titanic connection).

With the presenter free to move and point within the presentation screen area, iSkia also makes it possible to connect the remote mouse directly to the presenter's hand movement. Wherever she points, that's where the mouse goes.

It doesn't take a brain surgeon to realize that, with a synchronized click on the remote, it appears to the audience that the events on screen (the appearance of a bullet or image, the play of a movie, or the transition of a slide) are triggered by the presenter's movements, walking and pointing.

Another dramatic effect is the presenter's ability to physically control drawing tools, and to use a spotlight to highlight areas of the screen from within the performance – again, without detracting from the effect by standing outside the presentation area.

Vlahos calls this "controlling the eye-lines." The overall effect is to make the presentation one cohesive story, without a narrator disconnected from the visuals.

Again, there is no disengagement in the audience's attention between the presenter and the presentation. They are now one cohesive, organic delivery system.

Now, let's take this a step further. With iSkia properly configured, the presenter can put down the remote mouse, and his physical body becomes the pointing device itself.

It accomplishes this by using an ingeniously designed PowerPoint template. Hot zones on the screen trigger events like bullets, animation, transitions, and links to other slides and files. The movement of the presenter becomes visually woven into the presentation theme.

For example, it is no longer a disembodied mouse click from across the room that makes the curtain open, the car move, the chart data grow. It is the waving of the hand, the walk across the screen, or some other gesture or movement by the presenter.

With a motion of the hand, the mouse can be tossed across the screen, items grabbed and moved. Everything appears to be within the manual control of the presenter within the image itself.

This is beyond interactivity; I call it kinesthetic presentation. And it needs to be experienced to be properly appreciated.

The PowerPoint templates, authored and programmed by Zbig Rybczynski, really push the PowerPoint envelope through some ingenious tricks. iSkia overcomes the potential for erratic, unanticipated results by creating not one hot spot for a trigger, but rather a series of four contiguous invisible zones that are activated by the sweep of a hand or the walk across the stage.

In this way, some PowerPoint limitations are stretched to their limits with some very cool VBA programming. But the real power of iSkia is unleashed by using PowerPoint as a media platform and linking to a Macromedia Director file.

That's because Director allows for much more versatile control of the movement of screen elements and effects than does PowerPoint. By controlling the background and stage with body movement, the following types of effects are empowered:

Layers can be physically tossed aside, revealing the interior of a car or engine.
Data can be pulled up into a chart or graph (this can also be done in PowerPoint).
By walking across the screen with the properly created background, listeners will experience the presenter as though she's walking through an environment and interacting with it. She can enter rooms and trigger events, as though they were inside a QuickTime VR or similar environment.

I want to emphasize that this is far more than a parlor trick that will get old quickly as audiences adjust, as they might to a new set of backgrounds. Instead, the level of visual and emotional engagement is heightened between presenter and the audience, as the disconnect between the visual and personal is overcome by its complete cohesion.

Finally, looking ahead, two developments bode well for this technology. First, the implementation will be greatly simplified and reduced in cost as the iSkia technology is integrated directly into another generation of presentation projectors.

More dramatically, the Ultimatte "drop-out" technology is available to iMatte. This is the award winning real time masking capability, so that for the creators of iSkia presentations far more (photo)realistic backgrounds, stages and sets will be available for the kinesthetic presentation experience in real time. The presenter will not be limited to a conventional PowerPoint or Director background; instead, they will be free to roam and point over any image that a creative mind can devise.

So far, the main adopters of this technology have been academic institutions, but it seems inevitable that those with the most at stake in terms of reaching their audiences will adopt and adapt to this technology.

Particularly those accomplished presenters who are accustomed to using their body effectively to convey their message, and may even have been threatened by the imposition of distracting visuals, will be stimulated and inspired to be able to greatly explode the impact of their movement in harmony with the visuals which up til now have sometimes been a distraction.

This technology is obviously not for the lazy, unprepared presenter – but for those willing to embrace this technology, it will probably signal the end of "death by PowerPoint." Instead, Vlahos hopes that iSkia developers will comprise a set of the presentation elite, specializing in the ability to completely integrate the presenter and the presentation into a cohesive production – or performance – keeping an audience engaged, entertained and informed.

This will usher in the era of the kinesthetic presentation, and I believe that creative minds will take it to levels which we can barely imagine at this time.

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