PowerConzilla

Master's degree project: Power Conzilla

Background

Presentaitons can be held in various ways. Blackboards and overheads is probably the most 'traditional' approach when more than speach is neccessary. Recently presentations made in powerpoint or similar has gained in popularity, even webbrowsers are used sometimes. Even if you can do very advanced presentations with powerpoint it's mainly used for delivering row beyond row of text, interaction is limited to controlling the time separating the linearly ordered event. Another limitation of powerpoints is their format, it's hard to reuse and work with in any other context than presentation. Optimally you should be able to work in your favourite environment and then make a guided walktrouh acompanied with your comments and use that as a presentation.

The project

The idea is to extend Conzillas presenational strenght to a new level including sequencing like how it's done in powerpoint. The path through a presentation could be recorded similiar to how history is captured. Actually it should be possible to take a history recording and edit it into a power conzilla presentation. Maybe simple sequenceing from IMS can be used.

For this to be really powerful contextmaps need to be more dynamic, e.g. parts of the map should be hidden initially and show up after some increase in visibility. This will demands special editing support. Another nice feature would be to provide a scratchpad on top of everything.

Project environment:

• We strongly believe in the open source concept and we would therefore like the produced code to be licensed under GPL (GNU Public License).
• For reasons of compatibility with earlier work, we prefer that the code is written in Java.