Extensions and Improvements

Abstract

Designing an interface and specifying a creation process general enough to cover all eventualities is nearly impossible. We ran into the following perils and pitfalls while implementing the digital talks part of the DAGS multimedia proceedings:

• Missing or extra slides or wrong slide numbering forced us to rely on the video to determine the slides used and the order in which they were presented. This means that the video of the overhead screen not only served as a cue to index and edit the audio, but also as a final record of the slides actually used during the talks.

• It was sometimes necessary to concatenate a series of slides because they were important but shown without much comment by the speaker. The legibility of digitized slides that were resized to fit beneath the control panel and next to the table of contents also had to be enhanced manually at times.

• We had to reconstruct meaningful slide titles. Slide titles were used as index items. Thus, the assumption was made that the slide name provides meaningful index information. This was not always the case. Slide titles like “strategy point 1,” “strategy point 2,” and so on, are rather meaningless as index information. This means that even if the creation process is automated, there is still no replacement for the human expert, who needs to do the last check to make sure that the system produces meaningful output.

• Intermittent audiovideo equipment failures at the conference caused sporadic losses of video material. A strategy had to be devised that would allow for gaps in the material. We manually inserted the missing sound track, displayed the slides without comment, or omitted slides without sound track, depending on the context.

• Presentations where speakers just showed lengthy videos had to be omitted from the digital talks because they did not fit the slide-with-audio model.

• Advanced animation features like animated titles and transitions in software—supported presentations in systems like PowerPoint posed additional problems because current Web browsers and HTML do not support this style of animation. Such presentations had to be coerced into the static slide-with-audio model by using screen shots of screens once they were complete (i.e., once the last animated title on a screen had appeared).

Then, as if planning an exhibition, the designer must chart the details of what to animate, what to film, who to interview, how to arrange the information in the space they have built and so on.

—Economist