Creating animation for presentations

In recent years the use of computer-generated slides to accompany live presentation has become increasingly common. There is a potential for using computer graphics to increase the effectiveness of this type of presentation. The hardware for generating and projecting complex scenes and animation is in place, yet few efforts have been made in creating software to fully utilize these capabilities. This dissertation presents a system, called SLITHY, for giving live presentations accompanied by rich animated slides. This system has been developed and refined through several iterations of creating animated talks, then trying to simplify the authoring process by improving the system itself. We show some examples of presentations we've created with the system, as well as some from outside users who have used our system to present their own work. As we repeated the design cycle, we were also learning what types of animation were best suited for use in presentation. In this work we summarize our accumulated experience as a set of presentation animation principles. It is certainly possible to use animation poorly, but we believe that having a set of broadly applicable guidelines can assist presentation authors in applying these new tools in ways that enhance rather than detract from their subject matter.

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