Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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As many of you know I have a tendency to concentrate on PowerPoint as my main Office application and spend a lot of time studying and thinking about presentation related issues.

To that point I like attend major tech events, but try as I might, I could not manage to get a press credential to TED.com, a conclave of world luminaries in all areas, but especially science, held each year in Monterey, California.

The really nice thing about the conference is that most of the talks are eventually put online in a video format, and there are also blogs and forums in which to interact on a multitude of topics.

The tag line of TED is "ideas worth spreading," which is many ways the essence of presentations; although you could argue that an overall message may convey more than mere ideas — it could also embody (and the good ones always do) an emotional or even spiritual component.

What a presenter can learn by watching TED is that speakers are first of all most effective as authorities. The TED luminaries really know their stuff and they are without exception passionate about it.

In fact, if and when they ever use PowerPoint, it is seamless and completely transparent. I don't know what the presentation guidelines are, but I suspect bullets slides are taboo, if not by decree then certainly by implementation.

The program used is also transparent. Many of the presenters supplement their material with video, a multitude of images and other multimedia elements. But the audience could not tell you if the program used was PowerPoint, Keynote, or even the new Google presentation tool — any program that can import and display an image, from JPG to TIF, can certainly work at TED.

Now I will admit that I did in fact attend TED — if walking through the lobby and drifting into the Exhibit Hall can be called attendance... My close friends live in Monterey and I "happened to" visit that weekend, combining my trip with other business in the bay area.

In any case my three minutes in the exhibit hall and a look at the program showed me that Microsoft, of all people, had really come up with one of the most remarkable presentations at this year's event.

A while back I got fascinated with the QuickTime VR technology that allows users to build an interactive world by stitching together images.

I covered a Ulead program that lets you stitch together "panoramas" from a set of photographs in an update called My Big Fat Hawaiian Vacation; I used Ulead's Cool 3D program to stitch and then create a panorama from a set of photographs taken on the Big Island. The user can become immersed in these photographs and navigate through the environment.

Microsoft has taken this a step further by creating a "a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space telescopes in the world for a seamless, guided exploration of the universe."

In terms of a low-end panorama like the one created with Ulead Cool 3D or QuickTime VR, imagine being able navigate almost limitless space and then zoom in and out of areas with an almost infinite amount of "hotspots." That's what was demonstrated at TED. WorldWide Telescope is created with Microsoft’s new high-performance Visual Experience Engine™, which enables instant panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet.

One might have expected this to come from Google. Maybe Google is mapping this earth, but Microsoft is doing it visually in the cosmos on a grand scale. This is QuickTime VR on steroids, and, as you might expect, it requires massive processing power, particularly one would suppose on the graphics end.

To fully appreciate the WorldWide Telescope's "scope" you should watch the TED video of the presentation itself. In it Science educator Roy Gould and Microsoft’s Curtis Wong give you a guided tour of the universe. They zoon in on galaxies and astonishing structures from billions of miles away, traversing light years in seconds.

Taking Moore's Law into account, it is not inconceivable that in five or ten years you could use this technology to create interactive museums or if moved to the desktop, to make real estate presentations with virtual walkthroughs at the highest resolution.

The Microsoft Visual Experience Engine blends terabytes of images and data, along with narration and stories — it's like having a planetarium on your computer. The technology will be available in spring 2008 and will be free to educators and astronomers in the memory of scientist Jim Gray, who began the Sloan Digital Sky Survery.

InformIT Articles and Sample Chapters

What You Can Learn from SIGGRAPH

Books and eBooks

Molly Holzschlag's Special Edition Using HTML 4, Sixth Edition has more information about creating a virtual environment using HTML (VRML) in Chapter 34 available on Safari.

Adobe® Photoshop® Elements 4: 50 Ways to Create Cool Pictures by Dave Huss has an entire chapter on panoramas (which is another way to create a VR environment on a smaller scale than Microsoft's — available on Safari.

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