You begin with the horseless carriage model of technical innovation. You make a carriage with an internal combustion engine. What do you do with it? That is obvious. It is a carriage without a horse. So you will use it the same way you use a carriage with a horse. Except you don’t have to bother with the horse.
Same way with the bullet points and the neat line sequence of “slides”. The technology has come to be called “PowerPoint.” So you go into virtual reality and ask people, “How do we do PowerPoint here?”
If you are really committed to PowerPoint, go to Xstreet and search on PowerPoint. You will find a number of things that will do a similar job in Second Life. And most of them sell for less than you paid for breakfast at that last convention you attended.
To set up this example, I started with six annotated screen shots of the top level Viewer 2 menus. These are for kind of instructional presentation, so it is useful to consider how they could best be presented. I want these images to be useful without a presenter, so I put them on separate prims (making them panels or posters). To make them easy to handle, I linked them all into a single object. I have that object in my inventory. I can rez it anywhere I have build authority and can do a short talk on it anytime that is needed. I can even give away copies of it to the audience. So it works as a take-away slide show.
But what is the “right” order for these posters? There is an “overview” shot, of course. That must come first, and that is the one I am standing in front of. The remaining panels, however, give details about particular parts of the V2 screen. But the screen is not a line. It is an plane with two dimensions. Any linear rendering will be a bit arbitrary. Still, this is the kind of layout I would have to use if I did a time-linear presentation.
Here is my next version. The overview panel is in the center. But it is twice the size of the others, so it dominates on first glance. The other panels are arranged as an exploded view, with each panel near the part of the overview it represents.
I also put a relevant notecard (contents from the Hobo Kit) in each panel. A person can click on any panel and get much more comprehensive information than I could give in an oral presentation based on this display. And I can give this panel away, full perm, to anyone who wants a copy.
I still might be able to give a useful oral presentation, of course. If I do that, however, I suspect that I will only point out the main things to look for and plan to spend more time answering questions.
I probably would also spend some time making sure that everybody could use the zoom&roam capabilities of the viewer. Here is what I tell them about that (for Windows. Instructions for Mac differ slightly):
“To zoom in on an object: put your cursor on the object. Hold down Alt. The cursor will change to a rectangular magnifying glass with a plus sign in it.
Keep holding down Alt key. Hold the left mouse key down. Roll your scroll wheel. Move your mouse around and note what happens. Press your arrow keys and see what happens.”
Once people understand how to do this, they find they can get a good view of the entire presentation from any seat in the house. You know you have really learned this feature when you start looking for the zoom controls on the TV remote.
