MindXpres: Conceptual and Technical Foundations for Next Generation Presentation Solutions

Book excerpt: Presentation tools such as PowerPoint were initially created to simulate physical slides and have inherited a lot of their limitations. In this dissertation we identify the shortcomings and unmet user needs in presentation software by means of literature study, observations, a survey and the programmatic analysis of over 12000 PowerPoint documents. The results indicate that user needs are slowly evolving while existing software has hardly changed over the last 30 years. We motivate the need to rethink the concept of a presentation and we provide conceptual and technical foundations that can enable interoperable and well-integrated solutions for the identified shortcomings. The resulting MindXpres platform consists of a new conceptual framework, content model, information system and presentation engine. We present MindXpres as a presentation platform that enables researchers and developers to build innovative presentation solutions that cannot be implemented in the existing tools. We further demonstrate the flexibility of the MindXpres platform by discussing a wide range of proof-of-concept plug-in solutions for the identified shortcomings and unmet user needs.