OverView Zoomy presentations with OpenGL
I was looking the other day at different ways to present concepts and demos of software than the traditional OpenOffice.org Impress style slide presentation. There are some online Flash based presentation tools which offer a quite different concept, Prezi in particular is nicely done with a great user interface for editing the presentation, but my overriding thought when using it was that if I was building such a tool, I wouldn’t do it that way, so I made a prezi presentation to outline how I thought it should be done:
And so we have OverView which is in truth at the moment very little more than a statement of intent and a window with a ball in it. I have started to outline the design and to learn a bit about OpenGL and fonts, but the project is at a very early stage. If you are interested and either know a bit about 3d programming or, like me, nothing at all then do join in on the design discussion or in the #overview channel on Freenode IRC.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Zuissi and Devilicus, Ubuntu World Wide. Ubuntu World Wide said: #ubuntu #linux Alan Bell: OverView Zoomy presentations with OpenGL: I was looking the other day at different way… http://bit.ly/eil1Oz […]
Sounds like a great project. Unfortunately I don’t have the required skills to help with it, but having used Prezi in the past, I’d like to offer a few suggestions:
* As well as text, images and some basic drawing primitives, being able to embed a web browser “object” would be useful.
* A video object would also be good – but perhaps not needed if the web browser object can do native HTML5 video
* Prezi’s editing interface is interesting and novel, but I’d prefer a more traditional UI for the creator app
Since I first came across Prezi I’ve wondered when someone will write an equivalent HTML5 app. With SMIL animation, 3D canvas elements and faster Javascript coming to Firefox 4 I wonder if that’s worth looking at as a platform. It would be cross-platform; XULRunner or Prism can be used to make a stand-alone executable version; presentations would be implicitly distributable online.
Even if you still prefer to write a Quickly/OpenGL app, I would urge the use of a well-documented and easily parseable file format (compressed XML?) to allow for the possibility of other display clients in future.
+1 on MarkC’s plea for a (HTML5) web app.
In the world of prezi-like open-source solutions, there’s also JessyInk, which is based on SVG + JavaScript.
Have you considered taking a look at Ease, which already has existing code and sounds similar to what you have in mind?
http://www.ease-project.org/index.html
ehy Alan!!!
We’re working almost with the same aims!!
let’s look at this: http://launchpad.net/a4
we don’t use opengl directly, but we use cairo as a drawing layer, and svg as the preferred format (ehm, the only format supported).
Let’s think how we can collaborate, however.
bye!
-gaspa-
Hi, you might want to check out Jessyink – an Inkscape extension that allows you to make zoomy presentations that can be exported to SVG and viewed in a browser.
It’s pretty impressive and its available under GPLv3.
http://code.google.com/p/jessyink/
Brian
Hi, thumbs up to your idea!
Did you take a look into the clutter lib? You could use that instead of implementing it all in pure OpenGL (which will a lot of work I think). It’s OpenGL-based, has Python bindings and brings all the features you need to implement anyway.
http://www.clutter-project.org/
Jessyink is great, but I think it’s to complicated for the average user.
[…] OverView Zoomy presentations with OpenGL […]
Thanks all for the feedback, especially the links to jessyink and A4. I will certainly be having a look at the A4 code. Clutter and Cairo are interesting frameworks and are probably great starting points to provide the same functionality as things like prezi, but I think OpenGL will bring some additional potential (and a heap of difficult problems no doubt. Part of the objective is to learn more about 3d programming, which certainly isn’t an objective of the online web things with no freedom to study.
On the same idea as jessyink (SVG + JS), there’s sozi which you might also want to have a look at. http://sozi.baierouge.fr/wiki/doku.php?id=sozi
It’s like prezi, but based on open standards.
On the same idea as jessyink (SVG + JS), there’s sozi which you might also want to have a look at. http://sozi.baierouge.fr/wiki/doku.php?id=sozi It’s like prezi, but based on open standards.
Have you considered taking a look at Ease, which already has existing code and sounds similar to what you have in mind? http://www.ease-project.org/index.html
[…] embarassed, and thought that my project wont be an interesting argument; by the way, given that a post about zoomy-presentations in a desktop environment appears in Ubuntu Planet, given that I’ll give a talk about that at […]