MindXpres
Left Border
Prof. Dr. Beat Signer
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Department of Computer Science
Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels
(Belgium)
+32 2 629 1239, bsigner@vub.be
Office: PL9.3.60 (Pleinlaan 9)
VUB
View Beat Signer's profile on LinkedIn twitter View Beat Signer's profile on Facebook View Beat Signer's profile on YouTube Instagram View Beat Signer's profile on academia.edu View Beat Signer's profile on Google Scholar View Beat Signer's profile on ResearchGate View Beat Signer's profile in the ACM Digital Library View Beat Signer's ORCID profile Slideshare View Beat Signer's profile on Speaker Deck View Beat Signer's profile on 500px View Beat Signer's profile on SmugMug

MindXpres

With more than 30 million PowerPoint presentations that are created every single day, we cannot ignore the widespread and heavy use of slideware presentations in domains such as education or business. Current presentation tools like Microsoft's PowerPoint, Apple's Keynote or OpenOffice Impress have defined a de facto presentation standard over the years. As a matter of fact, this popular slide-based presentation standard is hardly questioned. However, if we have a close look at existing slide-based standards, we can identify a number of lacking features and a huge potential for more flexible and semantically enhanced future presentations tools. Existing slideware solutions, for example, enforce a linear navigation through a set of slides without any support to easily navigate between arbitrary slides. Furthermore, the space on a single slide is limited due to the lack of any zooming functionality, content is static and presentations are presenter-oriented. Last but not least, a major amount of the preparation time is spent on the aesthetic part of a presentation rather than on its content.


Our new MindXpres presentation tool addresses these problems by introducing a radically new presentation format. In our solution, a domain-specific language (in combination with a graphical editor) allows users to focus on the content, whereas the visualisation is managed by the tool based on a templating mechanism (similar to the separation of content and visualisation when creating a LaTeX document). This allows users to create presentations with the same graphical quality as offered by existing slideware tools but in a much more reusable manner. Our MindXpres presentation tool also introduces a number of new components to facilitate the presentation of specific types of information and in the future support for new media types can be added via a plug-in mechanism. The tool simplifies the creation and presentation of these different types of information and significantly reduces the amount of time that has to be spent for the appropriate visualisation (e.g. automatic syntax highlighting of source code snippets). Some other advanced features of MindXpres include non-linear traversal of the presentation, hyperlinks, transclusion, semantic linking and navigation of information, multimodal input, dynamic interaction with the content, the import of external presentations and more.
The visualisation of the content is done via a zoomable user interface, similar to Prezi, which offers more freedom regarding the available screen space. Together with multimodal input, this allows for a higher degree of interactivity. The final presentation is generated in HTML5, which makes presentations very portable and even allows viewing them on mobile devices. By combining our content-centred language with HTML's visualisation capabilities and JavaScript's dynamism, we take the concept of dynamic and engaging presentations to a whole new level.

More details can be found on the dedicated MindXpres website.

Related Publications

  • 2021

  • 2019

  • 2017

  • 2016

  • 2015

  • 2014

  • 2013