The PaperPoint application is a simple but very effective tool for giving PowerPoint presentations.
The slide handouts are printed on Anoto paper together with some additional paper buttons for controlling the
PowerPoint presentation. A Digital Pen is used to remotely control the PowerPoint presentation over wireless
Bluetooth technology.
Fig. 1: PaperPoint
The PaperPoint printouts of the slide handouts contain various buttons for interacting with the PowerPoint application.
Below each slide there is a 'Show' button which is used to switch to the corresponding slide in the digital presentation.
Further, a user can point directly to a slide, which switches to the corresponding digital slide version, and annotate the
digital version by writing on the printed slide. At the bottom of each page, there are additional 'Next' and 'Previous'
buttons for giving linear presentations and a 'First' and 'Last' button to jump to a presentation's first or last slide,
respectively. A first evident benefit of the PaperPoint application is the fact that the presenter no longer has to stand
next to the computer to control the slide presentation. The slides can be navigated remotely by pen and paper via a
Bluetooth connection, which provides more freedom to the presenter for interacting with the audience. However, many other
devices are available for controlling presentations remotely including wireless mice or even more specific presentation
aids. While it is convenient to control the slide presentation remotely, this is not a unique feature of the paper-based
user interface.
Compared to the conventional PowerPoint user interface, the paper-based PaperPoint control enables a more flexible
way of giving presentations. The printed handouts provide a perfect overview over the available slides and, without
switching to PowerPoint’s slide sorter and interrupting the flow of the presentation, slides can be presented in a
non-linear order. The presenter can jump from one slide to any other slide by selecting the 'Show' buttons or pointing
directly to specific slides and the audience will not recognise at all that the slides are not presented in their
original order. This is not only very convenient if some slides have to be skipped because of time constraints,
but also for showing specific slides while answering questions coming from the audience.
If a presenter starts to annotate one of the slides on the paper handouts, the written information is digitised and
immediately integrated into the digital presentation by adding it to the appropriate slide. This functionality can, not
only be used for highlighting existing parts of a slide, but also for spontaneously annotating a slide with textual
information or diagrams. An example showing the highlighting of parts of a slide to emphasise important sections is
shown in Fig. 1. The presenter highlighted the header of an XML document by circling it with the pen
and drawing an arrow pointing to the text. Although this highlighting could also be directly done in the digital slide
version, a major advantage of the paper-based solution is that it can be applied more easily than using a mouse. Note
that of course it is also still possible to draw on slides using existing technologies, i.e. a computer mouse. However,
not many people use this functionality since the mouse was not really invented as a writing tool and it is almost impossible
to write text on a slide using a mouse. Our PaperPoint application brings this functionality back to the appropriate tool
for creating handwritten annotations—paper and pen.
Fig. 2: Annotations
Another very powerful feature of the PaperPoint application is the fact that it can be controlled by
any number of digital pens and not only a single pen. By having multiple input devices, collaboration
between multiple users is supported. For example, the participants of a group meeting can collaboratively
control a presentation and select which slides have to be shown. Each user has a version of the printed
handouts and a digital pen allowing them to interact with the presentation. All annotations made on specific
slides can be stored in a database and made available to other users which, for example, could be used by
students for sharing notes that they have taken during a lecture. A student no longer has access to their
personal physical annotations only, but can also use the handouts to retrieve comments from other students
that have been stored in the database.
Especially in decision-making tasks, the collaborative presentation navigator can improve the overall performance by
providing fast shared access to the relevant resources. If, for a moment, we forget about the content of a
presentation, we get another application scenario where the PaperPoint tool can be applied in brainstorming sessions.
Such a session can start either from an empty slide or be based on a slide containing some initial thoughts. A user
can write down ideas on a paper document and share them with other users by projecting them on a screen. The
PaperPoint application has been realised mainly by implementing active components which interact with the
PowerPoint application. To access the functionality of the PowerPoint Windows application from Java, we used
the Java/Win32 (Jawin) integration project. Jawin is an open source architecture for interoperation between
the Java programming language and components exposed through the Component Object Model (COM) or Dynamic
Link Libraries (DLLs). PaperPoint focused on accessing and controlling PowerPoint functionality. The same
approach could easily be applied to integrate any Windows application and it is even possible to access
functionality from multiple applications based on the very same paper document, thereby integrating paper with
digital functionality provided by different applications. While only a small subset of PowerPoint’s functionality
has actually been used by the PaperPoint navigation control to date, potentially any PowerPoint features
could be accessed and integrated with the paper-based user interface.
News: Anoto has announced the release of their first interactive paper application Anoto penPresenter.
It has similar functionality to PaperPoint developed at ETH Zurich as a demonstrator within the EU project
PaperWorks where Anoto and ETH Zurich were partners.
