Adrian Doyle (pictured to the left) has worked in the IT
sector for many years implementing large scale business and enterprise
applications for clients including British Airways and the UK's
Inland Revenue. He also has managed new start-up companies in the
Internet sector and helped to turn them into successful businesses.
He now heads Visual Exemplars Ltd, a UK based company tha creates
Perspector, the popular 3D add-in for PowerPoint.
Geetesh:
Adrian:
Tell us more about yourself and what led to Perspector..
I've been working in IT for over 20 years, performing roles
ranging from development, project management and strategic
marketing for a large multi-national corporation. Latterly
I have been focused on turning Internet startups into successful
businesses. Perspector started as an idea formed with a small
number of fellow investors who like me feel frustrated with
existing tools for expressing complicated ideas. The main
idea was to combine the simplicity and familiarity of the
PowerPoint GUI with the expressiveness of 3D images.
Geetesh:
Adrian:
How can 3D help inside a presentation.
3D can help the presenter to capture complex ideas and messages
in a simple diagram. Our brains are programmed to think in
3D, so a complex idea can more readily be grasped when presented
in 3D.
Judicious use of a few key images, maybe only a couple per
presentation, can bring a presentation alive making it both
more interesting and better at conveying the message.
An even more powerful approach is where a cascade of slides
elaborating many minor points (a common problem among PowerPoint
presentations) can be reduced to a single succinct 3D image.
This is clearly illustrated in the sample Nano Knives sales
presentation in Gallery
3 on our website.
In this presentation, a fictitious knife manufacturer, Nano
Knives, wants to sell the idea that their product fills a
gap in a market. In a typical presentation they might show
a blizzard of slides displaying lists of competitors, numbers
of existing purchasers, lists of current outlets, etc. etc.
All of this would be with the aim of bombarding the audience
with supportive evidence of their claim. However, such detail
would be unlikely to hold anyone’s attention or, more
importantly, convince anyone. This is a common trap for presenters
struggling to create meaningful content.
Using 3D however, Nano Knives are able to graphically illustrate
the core idea they wish to get across. The audience is shown
a physical block, with a corner piece missing. This corner
piece is then revealed to be their product. This is an image
that is readily understood and will remain with the audience.
The presenter is then free to perform a verbal presentation
explaining each of the reasons that back up the claim, interacting
with questions and observations by the audience. Any supplementary
data can then be provided in printed form.
Geetesh:
Adrian:
How does Perspector work inside PowerPoint and how does it
aim to to fulfill the lack of a 3D environment in that
program.
Perspector works seamlessly within PowerPoint offering the
same toolbar approach.
To enable fully interacting 3D shapes to be displayed and
edited in PowerPoint, Perspector introduces the concept of
a Perspector frame. A Perspector frame contains 3D shapes.
To PowerPoint, a frame behaves like a picture. It can be
displayed on any slide. It can be copied and pasted between
slides. It can be animated using PowerPoint animation to
fly around the slide, to fade in or out, or any other type
of animation effect.
When the frame is double-clicked, it becomes editable. The
user interface to edit the shapes inside the frame has been
kept as close as possible to PowerPoint’s native user
interface. For example, 8 resize handles are drawn at the
corners of a selected shape, and dragging a shape moves it.
This was an essential design criteria for Perspector, as
PowerPoint users would need to find it natural to switch
between editing 2D and 3D shapes.
Where the interface needed to be extended to cater for 3
dimensions, the extensions have been provided as sympathetically
as possible to PowerPoint’s original design. A good
example of this is the provision of three rotation handles
where PowerPoint only needed one.
Geetesh:
Adrian:
How has the response to Perspector been - also tell us
more about what new features were introduced in the new version
as a direct result of user feedback.
Response: Very positive
and helpful - v2.0 owes a lot to detailed feedback from early
adopters and reviewers.
New Features: For example,
feedback brought to our attention that version 1.0 suffered
from some speed issues when switching between
PowerPoint and Perspector. These problems originated
from the use of Microsoft ActiveX technology. For version
2.0
an innovative redesign replaced ActiveX with a more flexible,
lightweight solution. This fixed the speed issues and
also made the file sizes of presentations far smaller,
resulting
in a greatly more useable tool.
Perspector 1.0 had a slide-centric design, that is, it was
based around the idea of having a single Perspector frame
per slide. There were a number of calls for a desire to fit
more than one frame per slide, and to be able to manipulate
the frame more easily. This lead to a shift in Perspector’s
design. Perspector 2.0 now has a shape-centric design – it
can easily accommodate having many frames on each slide,
and as previously discussed, each frame can be treated as
any PowerPoint image. This change has proved popular. It
has greatly increased the use of Perspector to generate small
3D images that can be used to add a touch of elegance to
a slide.
The other feature of version 2.0 that was often requested
in version 1 was 3D animation. The contents of a frame can
now be spun around. This really shows-off the 3D nature of
the shapes.
Geetesh:
Adrian:
Tell us more about Perspector's support infrastructure.
Our highly motivated support team typically respond to support
issues within 24 hours. As a company we respect the fundamental
role our customers have in ensuring our venture continues,
and so we recognize the importance of following up properly
on any issue that they may encounter using our technology.
Basically, we want Perspector to work for you, and we will
work with you to make that happen.
Geetesh:
Adrian:
Is there any trivia you would like to share - perhaps
an unconventional use of Perspector or something similar.
We were amused when Steve, our Director of Sales and Operations,
took the Community Gallery picture to a printer to produce
it as a poster to use at conferences. (You may recall that
it has a Perspector image superimposed in correct perspective
on a banner outside of the Tate Britain art gallery.)
The
picture was on one person's screen when someone bounded
over to ask where we had got the banner showing on our poster
printed. He thought it was a real banner and not just a
digitally
enhanced image created by Perspector. It was a pleasing
reminder of how powerful Perspector-generated images can
be!
We were amused when Steve, our Director of Sales and Operations,
took the Community Gallery picture to a printer to produce
it as a poster to use at conferences. (You may recall that
it has a Perspector image superimposed in correct perspective
on a banner outside of the Tate Britain art gallery.)