PaperPoint - A Paper-based Presentation Tool

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.

 

PaperPoint

Figure 1: PaperPoint presentation tool

 

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. More importantly, 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.

 

 

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. Furthermore, PaperPoint can be controlled by multiple pens supporting 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. 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.

Related Publications

Status: Ongoing

External Research Groups Involved
GlobIS - ETH Zurich

Related Research Topics