A Collaborative Web Presentation Support System Using an Existing Presentation Software

Abstract

We implemented a collaborative web presentation system for realizing a reactive presentation. The system consists of a personal computer (PC) for a presenter and PCs (or tablet devices) for audience members. The presenter uses the existing presentation software PowerPoint. The audience members use existing Web browsers. The system is used for working collaboratively with audience members. A presenter with the system manipulates or modify PowerPoint slide objects (such as a drawing graph, a picture, a text box) on a slide page in real time to tackle unexpected situations for responding unexpected questions and improving the state of the knowledge of the audience. The system can control the attention of audience members by using animation effects of the slide objects. The animation effects, such as moving the objects, changing size and color of the objects, is used to control the attention of audience members and realize non-verbal communication. The presenter synchronizes his/her slide display of PowerPoint with the display on the Web browsers of the audience members with our new method based on the WebSocket communication. We outline the system architecture and its implementation method. The experiments show that the performance of the system is enough for practical use.