SpontaneousPresentation | spot non-linear presentations

SpontaneousPresentation is a C++ library. SpontaneousPresentation has no bugs, it has no vulnerabilities and it has low support. You can download it from GitHub.

This tool lets you "throw together a talk" by just dropping images into a folder. The software gives you a "busy box" UI with one button per image thumbnail (meant to be served via web to a touch screen). Pressing one of the thumbnails changes which image is displayed on the host machine which is connected to a projector. Thus, during a non-linear talk, you have a "bank" of images that you can choose from during the talk as-needed. "Oh, I just mentioned Passage, so throw an image of that on the screen." Then later, "Oh, I just mentioned Nintendo DS as a platform, throw an image of that on the screen.". There obviously still needs to be SOME planning: a general idea of what images to include ahead of time. But, I imagine that after you give a few talks like this, that image collection will get refined, and you'll come up with a good base set of images that are pretty useful for the kind of stuff you generally talk about. Then maybe you'll pepper in a few special-case images before each new talk. I've seen a bunch of people speak in my lifetime. Outside of academia and games, NONE of them gave prepared talks. Examples include Oliver Stone, Gloria Steinem, Chuck D, Terrence McKenna, and Jordan Peterson. On the other hand, they had no visuals either. Power Point and "off-the-cuff-talk" really don't mix. So they just got up there and talked. But having a visual component helps to hold people's attention and express things that are hard to put into words. This tool attempts to bridge that gap. You could also imagine this tool being used for panels, fireside chats, and other non-linear presentation formats. In the case of a panel, for example, you could ask each panelist for some images ahead of time, arrange them in folders, and then give each panelist a touch screen UI pointing at the same host machine (maybe just through the browsers on their individual phones). Then, during the panel discussion, they can pull up relevant images as-needed. Having the control interface served through a web connection offers quite a bit of flexibility.