PresentAction: a disruptive mobile system designed for bridging the physical-digital gap in information sharing events

Abstract: Since 1960, when the rst slide projectors were manufactured and people started using slides as a support for delivering information to their audience in educational and institutional environments, not much has changed. Nowadays slide presentations are still based on the traditional interaction methods between presenter and audience that limit the experience to the live event. Considering the worldwide raising number of smartphone users and the increasing interest by researchers in mobile education, this research aims to give its contribution to a marginally explored field: the mobile presentation systems space. Mobile presentation system is intended to be a fully mobile service that supports presenter and audience during all the phases of a slide based event and enhance the user experience by enabling interaction between physical and digital presentation spaces. The first goal of this work was to understand if there is an underserved demand for innovation in the current presentation interaction model and what the perceived needs and wants are. People sensible to this field went through interviews and surveys, conducted from both the presenter and the audience perspectives. The results showed that about 87% of the participants had previously experienced visibility problems during presentations, causing frustration and lack of concentration damaging both audience and presenter. 80% of the people use email for sharing their slide set to the audience, a non effective way to reach all the attendants. The ability to send/get the material was considered critical both from the presenter and the audience points of view, assessing it 3.3/5 and 3.9/5 respectively. Other major problems of technical nature (software and hardware) emerged as often experienced by almost half the participants. This preliminary qualitative investigation built the basis of the PresentAction concept that was conceived to solve the raised problems and to support presenter and audience during all the phases of a presentation (before, during and after the live session) in a single solution. The concept was the guideline of the designed and developed system. PresentAction lets any connected smartphone user, regardless his/her technical skills, run slideshows from already existing slide decks anywhere and at any time and automatically create complete, high quality, interactive, updatable, learning object delivered to the attending users through smart content delivery methods. The system was experimentally validated, both technically (several performance measurements) and from the end user experience point of view (system trial and surveys). The users were really satisfied, rating the developed system at 4.25/5 and with more than 80% of the participants willing to adopt this system both as presenter and audience. The users emphasized in particular the usefulness of being able to run presentations even without the support of a projector (connecting directly presenter and audience devices) and the possibility of creating a personal, mobile portfolio of "talking" slides of the events they attended. The performed experiments also demonstrated that pre-fetching based slide distribution is fundamental for increasing the number of concurrent users in the audience while keeping a real time feeling for the presentation, with limited delays in the transition between slides on their mobile device. Finally a new concept of slides as learning multimedia objects, merging images with audio and supporting a variety of digital on demand services, was developed and demonstrated as a superior solution, in terms of both communication costs and user experience, to accessing a complete raw video of the presentation event. Experimental evidence showed that this approach can require as low as 945 times less communication resource than current video-based solutions.