Go Minority Report on your Slides! pptPlex by Microsoft Research


Video: pptPlex details: the pptPlex ribbon, presenting pptPlex decks

If you saw the Touch Wall demonstration by Bill Gates, you would have noticed the cool and fluent interactive interface that the Touch Wall had. He used it to browse throught many PowerPoint presentations on the fly, along with panning and zooming. The pptPlex plugin available for download by Microsoft Office Labs lets you do that on in Microsoft PowerPoint now. It’s used by a mouse and not a touch interface though, but then those aren’t common yet.

image

Using pptPlex you can place your slides on a zoomable canvas, and browse through them. There is also a feature called live content slides which are slides that point to other Microsoft Office documents ( such as Word or Visio ), so when the presentation is started the document is placed on the canvas, and when it’s updated the canvas is also updated the next time the presentation is launched.

The hyperlinks and animations don’t work yet as it’s just a prototype. And it only works with Office 2007 as well. If you’re looking for a whole new way to give your presentations, pptPlex is worth a try. And unlike Windows Vista, this might just get you a real ’Wow’ from your audience!