[PLUG] Two screen presentation software

[Keith Lofstrom]

Thursday morning I attended an AEA event, a "mock VC" presentation.
My friend Jeff Zurshmeide and a partner did a mock presentation of
their imaginary startup to a committee of three local venture 
capitalists, followed by their evaluation meeting.  We got to see
how they perform the process;  very educational.  However, that is 
not what I am writing about here.

One of the things I observed was the relentless sequential nature of a
typical Powerpoint slide show performance;  Jeff and his friend had
their pitch rehearsed, and found it very difficult to change order
in order to answer the VC's questions.  I think some of that is the
paradigm imposed on them by their software, which does not easily
support skipping around.

Most modern laptops have two complete video generation systems;  it
is possible to display one image on the laptop screen,  and send an
entirely different image out the VGA/DVI port to the projector.  A
next-generation presentation program could make good use of this
capability.

This means the presenter can be looking at a "control panel", with
perhaps a quarter of the laptop screen devoted to the projected
image, and the other three quarters for script, messaging, notes,
slide sorter, etc.  Further, for situations where audience input 
redirects the order of the slides, the software should adapt to that,
allowing the presenter to resequence in real time, not touching on 
the out-of-order slide again, perhaps adding backup slides or removing
slides from the presentation in real time.   Slides could be made with
"hotspots", indicated areas on the user's panel that cause some 
animation (like text lining up, or movement in part of a diagram)
to happen on the projected screen.  Imagine a flowchart or data flow
diagram, where you can make "data" appear to move down the path you
are talking about by moving your mouse over it on your control panel.

I don't know of any presentation software that offers these capabilities,
but it might not be difficult to do under Linux.  Is there anything
like this out there?  If not, is anyone inspired to do this as an
open source project?   

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs