Building Digital Narratives - Microsoft Research Showcases Cutting Edge Technology for Rich Internet Narratives (RIN)

Imagine flying over the majestic Himalaya mountains and slowly descending on to the Domkhar valley near Ladakh. You enjoy a panoramic view of the lush green valley and wonder how it looked in winter snow. You pause a moment, and with a click of a mouse, contrast the view, now brimming with life, with a desolate winter not too long ago. You land and enter the village. Now you reckon it is time to enter an ancient monastery. Presently you are in. As you hear the incantations you look around. You find a wall showing several images of the Buddha, each illustrating a different symbolic sign. You can't just walk by, you need to know more. The narrative pauses. You approach the wall, go take a closer look, turn around and the narrative continues. The whole experience is media-rich, interactive and immersive.


Microsoft Research recently showcased a new technology called Rich Internet Narratives (RIN) that combines the best of two worlds. On the one hand you have the power of storytelling narrative, which traditional media such as video, audio and text provide. On the other hand you have the exploratory freedom offered by new technologies such as 3D scene construction from photo images, gigapixel image navigation and interactive maps. RIN brings these two together in a compelling interactive narrative.

Curious? Check out the Digital Narratives website.

Lessons on Better Presenting from San Diego

I had the good fortune to represent Harbinger at the Presentation Summit 2010 (formerly known as PPT Live) in San Diego from Oct 17-20. In its eighth year, the Summit brings together some of the world's best presentation designers and presenters in an exchange of ideas and best practices for four days of intense activity.

Image Credits http://www.betterppt.com/summit

Some of the presenters and speakers included Nancy Duarte, Rick Altman, Geetesh Bajaj, Ric Bretschneider, Nigel Holmes, Sandra Johnson, Glen Millar, Echo Swinford and Julie Terberg. They have several distinctions to their credit - from being a Microsoft MVP to being involved in designing presentations for Al Gore to directing graphics for Time magazine.

Here are some hidden gems that came from the interactions.

1. Top 3 peeves of audience: (1) Presenter reads the slides (2) Slides contain full sentences (3) Some fonts are too small to read (This survey was repeated year after year with more-or-less same conclusions)
2. Universal axiom #1 : If it moves, they have to look. At the same time, improper animation  is a leading cause of death by PowerPoint.
3. Sometimes the best way to get your point across is to put up a blank slide and perform in front of your audience.
4. Three rules for better visuals: (1) use primitive features (color, size, orientation, movement, shape, depth) to get attention (2) use grouping to show relationships (3) reduce the realism of your graphics
5. Don't memorize - just know the transitions
6. Your audience cares about how much you share - not how much you know
7. Enough already! The biggest problem of slides is too much text
8. Slides cannot double as handouts. Printing out slides to make a handout is a bad idea. Slides and handouts serve two completely different purposes. Slides should be visual. Handouts should be textual.

Enhancing the Cognitive Style of PowerPoint with Interactivity

If you went to a dinner party where all guests were to present their stories in PPT format - it might be informative but also a bore. The unfortunate price of simplification is over-simplification, and the additional tax paid out is in the form of pedantry - says Youngme Moon, the author of Different, a recent book on marketing.

Edward R. Tufte, professor emeritus at Yale University, presents a scholarly criticism of PowerPoint in two of his essays:  PowerPoint is Evil  (Wired, 11(9), 2003) and The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint  (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. ISBN 0961392169).

According to Wikipedia, here are Tufte’s arguments against the overuse of PowerPoint: 

1. It is used to guide and to reassure a presenter, rather than to enlighten the audience;
2. It has unhelpfully simplistic tables and charts, resulting from the low resolution of early computer displays;
3. The outliner causes ideas to be arranged in an unnecessarily deep hierarchy, itself subverted by the need to restate the hierarchy on each slide;
4. Enforcement of the audience's linear progression through that hierarchy (whereas with handouts, readers could browse and relate items at their leisure);
5. Poor typography and chart layout, from presenters who are poor designers and who use poorly designed templates and default
6. Simplistic thinking, from ideas being squashed into bulleted lists, and stories with beginning, middle, and end being turned into a collection of disparate, loosely disguised points. 

We believe that these limitations of PowerPoint are overcome by interactivity, as is evident when you consider interactivity tools such as Raptivity Presenter.  Let me explain how the combination of Raptivity Presenter and PowerPoint alleviates some of the concerns outlined above.

1.  By its very nature, Raptivity Presenter’s  output objects are interactive. A presentation may be sent in email to a user, who can experience the interactive elements at their own pace – thus reassuring the audience, not just the presenter.
2. With the use of Flash, the content displayed by Raptivity Presenter presumes high resolution and is rich.
3.  There is no compulsion to arrange material hierarchically, because Raptivity Presenter provides a  variety of presentation alternatives (accordion panels, page flip books, rotating 3D cubes, panning cards, flash cards, magnifiers, tabs, etc.)
4. Due to this, audience can progress non-linearly through the presentation material. Consider the selective displays or business visuals in Raptivity Presenter. They are perfect for drilling down by audience.
5. The beauty of professionally designed interaction models is that you get ready-made graphics and text types – you simply change the content. 
6. Language shapes the way you think. With Raptivity Presenter, the controlling metaphor is not the bullet list – instead you have story builders, selective displays, business visuals, brainteasers and such other rich interaction metaphors.

We agree with Prof Tufte that the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates and trivializes content. Several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint are churning out trillions of slides each year.  Majority of these slides do not do a good job of educating the audience. 

We however believe that instead of doing away with PowerPoint, it is better to add interactivity to it – so that we reap the benefits of both ubiquity and interactivity.

The Wilderness Downtown - An Interactive Film Built in HTML5

Watch this interactive film using your Google Chrome browser. It features Arcade Fire's song "We used to wait", and plays in your hometown! Shows the capabilities of HTML5, Google Streetview and more. Worth a watch.

Scratch and Google App Inventor

Yesterday my friend's daughter proudly showed off her new game, built entirely using Scratch, a 'codeless' programming language invented by MIT engineers. When I asked her to show me how she built the program, she showed the drag-and-drop interface of Scratch, where you simply create graphic objects on screen and drag code fragments from a library to a panel where they kind of fit together, get copied, and so forth. Not so completely codeless after all, but great for beginners.

The invitation-only Google App Inventor, by all accounts, resembles Scratch in many ways. Creating Apps for Dummies has long been a holy grail for tool designers. Google, in its grandiose fashion, promises to transform the app building landscape with Google App Inventor. The idea is to provide a non-programming, visual app building environment that would open up an ecosystem of do-it-yourself software developers. What a contrast from Apple's complex programming language and tedious app publishing process! However, if app inventor is anything like Scratch, I would contend that the 'app building for all' messaging could be over-hyped.  It is programming in a new guise.

Blog Links for Webmasters

Here's a way to find some posts I have written over the last year that website owners will find interesting. This Peeler Ad below announces the titles of posts. Peel down the top banner to discover the next post. When you find something interesting, just click through to that post! Happy reading.

Enhancing Your Web Presence with SiteJazzer

A compelling web site is the lifeblood of any internet business. Even small brick-and-mortar businesses and organizations increasingly depend on their web presence to build traction with customers and stakeholders. Online stores conduct sales transactions. Publishers and bloggers try to make their sites interesting to bring traffic which can be monetized.  Agencies and consultants help all these entities get the most out of their investments.No matter what type of web site you are responsible for, our research in interactivity has convinced us that people are spending more and more time online and we’d better provide tools that will fight boredom.

That is why we built Raptivity, now a huge success in elearning, where students love games and simulations. Then came YawnBuster – for making classroom learning fun. Then came Raptivity Presenter, a tool that make presentations fun and engaging. It was about time we did something for webmasters, site owners, site designers and bloggers who want to engage users better. That is when we thought of TeemingPod and now we are proud to introduce SiteJazzer. This stuff is badly needed.

www.sitejazzer.com

The SiteJazzer vision is to get people to interact more with websites and blogs than ever before. Get people to stay longer, engage better and return sooner to web sites. Turn web sites into places where stuff gets done through meaningful interaction. Turn web visits into experiences that are enjoyable and valuable.

We’re seeing traction from many corners of the market. Design and marketing agencies, small and medium businesses, publishers, corporate departments, individuals – they’re all excited and some of them are fanatic proponents of interactivity. I can see it from the way their web sites are changing. With SiteJazzer, I am excited about several new things that are on the drawing board. When I look at those, I’m convinced what we have here is just the beginning.

Use SiteJazzer to get people to love your site. It’s simple. Pick any interaction. Make quick changes. We build the Flash. You drop it into your site. You might think of SiteJazzer interactions as professionally designed Flash widgets – but there’s more. SiteJazzer interactions are highly customizable. They are quick and easy to adapt to your site. You can use them creatively in many ways.

Does Your Web Site Give What People Are Looking For?

Courtesy XKCD: http://xkcd.com/773/

How to Keep Users on a Web Site

A recently published article on Knowtebook argues that it is impossible to show all information of interest to users at one go - so searching is inevitable. However, users tend to leave a web page if they don't see what they are looking for - immediately.

How are some of the most interactive websites combating this challenge? The article, titled Why and How to Keep Users on a Web Site,  includes great examples from some of the coolest sites. iPad, Wrangler and Bebopjeans, to name a few. Worth a look. I love the way these sites give you cool activities to do, while revealing more and more information. It's as though you were exploring their collection.

Apple's Patent Pipeline Shows What to Expect

With iPhone 4 and iPad selling like crazy, you might think Apple's laptop research may be taking a back seat. Think again. Here are some of the patent filings related to Mac, the ultimate Apple experience:

• Solar powered computers
• Touch-screen desktops
• Built-in projector which lets you display video on a wall
• Seamless laptop with invisible buttons, keyboards and trackpad
• Screen camera that detects your presence and powers up the computer as soon as you approach it

As Apple surpasses Microsoft in market capitalization - a significant milestone - it is good to see its focus on innovative R & D which will make great user experiences.