Presenting from a new angle?

This blogpost was authored by Dr Matthew W Darlison, Lecturer at the UCL Institute of HealthInformatics.

It’s rare - at least in my experience - to walk around a corner and have your breath taken away by a technology that feels so intuitively right that you wonder why it isn’t already everywhere, but that’s what happened early in 2019, and I’ve been working out ever since why that moment made such a dramatic impact.

I was accustomed to a variety of styles of presentation, in both physical space and on screen:

• The actor, who uses the space available to the full, and for whom a projection screen with slides serves as a backdrop;

• The newscaster, who stays firmly behind the desk or lectern, facing front, while their slides are displayed beside them in space;

• The weather forecaster, who moves in front of their slides but is fastidious about facing the front, and practiced enough to point uncannily to things seemingly by touch (probably because they have a screen relaying the camera feed somewhere off to the side) and not to obscure anything important;

• The irrepressible enthusiast, who starts off like a weather forecaster, but - overcome with passion - often turns away from the audience to talk into the screen while pointing at some or other part of it.

• The wizard (of Oz?) who is never even seen, manifesting only as a disembodied voice over full-screen pictures;

• The Cheshire cat - a talking head that appears in front of the material being presented, speaks, and then often disappears again. 

What I saw as I came around that corner, though, was none of these. Rather it was a presentation style reminiscent of the puppeteers and presenters of the children’s TV of my youth. A technology that demanded that the presenter face the front, but that placed the stuff of the presentation between them and me, on an invisible surface that I felt like I could reach out and touch.

I’d met the lightboard - you should too, if you get the chance.