Most people are familiar with the presentation program called Prezi. The goal of Peter Arvai, founder of Prezi, was to create a way to really engage an audience during a presentation, as opposed to just flipping through a stack of bulleted slides. From this idea he created Prezi, and although Prezi has grown immensely over the years, Microsoft Powerpoint is still the leader of the market. Because of this, Prezi is ready to take presentations to a whole new level through the incorporation of augmented reality. After watching companies such as Snapchat, Facebook, Google, and Apple apply this technology Arvai and his team wanted to bring augmented reality into presentations. Understanding that the traditional setup for a presentation, a speaker in front a screen, lends itself well to the standard projected presentation. However, in situations such as web conferences, those in the video conference either see the speaker or a slide with information. Arvai wants to change this by allowing the speaker to pull up graphs, images, etc. next to and or around her while delivering a speech.This would allow for a unique immersive experience for the audience, and could potentially revolutionize presentations. However, Prezi is still developing this product and it may be a while before they have a solid product to place on the market.
Information retrieved from:
Pardes, Arielle. “Sorry, PowerPoint: The Slide Deck of the Future Will Be in AR.” Wired. Conde Nast, 20 Oct. 2017. Web.
Image retrieved from:
Will Augmented Reality Transform Banking? ยป Banking Technology. N.d. Banking Technology. BankingTech.com, 10 May 2017. Web.
I think applying augmented reality to presentations would help create a new way of showing information, especially if the presentation involves a lot of the visuals of the subject. Augmented reality could potentially make the presentation interactive, such as editing something on screen with your hands. Although Prezi seems like a great idea, it seems it would take some time before they could overshadow bigger products like Microsoft Powerpoint. One of the reasons for this is that Powerpoint is much simpler to use, and creates a simpler looking presentation, which is something people could easily look at. However, when it comes to the new technologies being created, Prezi would be a good idea to use to show everything about it. It could even make it easier for anyone to create augmented realities and use it more in every day lives to bring a more lively way to show information everywhere. Overall, although Prezi is still developing this technology, I could see the potential it has in presenting data and information in the future.
This blog post was very interesting because I have used Prezi for various projects since high school. Even though I am giving more presentations now that I am a few years into college, I can honestly say that I have only used Prezi once since I have come to Penn State. Part of this drifting can be attributed to the fact that Prezi has not been as intuitive as I remember it being in high school and I also believe that there were some limitations to the student access account that held me back from using the platform completely. I’m sure that there have been new templates released since the last time I logged in, however if the company is able to evolve into the realm of augmented reality, I can definitely see it becoming relevant again due to its ability to engage audiences in a new way. Although I have seen use of this technology on major news programs as of recent, sometimes these animations can seem very basic or more of a distraction rather than adding to the cohesiveness of the report. If Prezi can make sophisticated AR templates with technology compatibility, many companies could find it extremely valuable. Just imagining the possibilities to enhance business presentations or TED talks gets me excited to find out what the future has in store.