Blog Post #5
Kerry McGlynn
Blog Post #5
I can really relate to learning about how Peter Arvai feels about how boring PowerPoint presentations can be. Through my journey through college especially I have realized how boring and useless they can be to an audience. But I also know that on the other end, for example being the presenter, I don’t mind them. They are very boring sitting in the seat of an audience but I think they are useful tools for the speaker. With that said why haven’t we switched to the more interesting version that Peter Arvai has created Prezi? That is a good question that I am not sure I can answer because I have never used one in one of my presentations. I have however seen one but the last time that I saw one I was in high school. I am not a huge fan of change and I always stuck with the original but they definitely did catch my eye and I loved the fact that you could zoom in and focus on different aspects throughout your presentation. To me this worked tremendously because it didn’t allow me to get sidetracked when the presenter was talking with other information distracting me from what they wanted me to hear. Maybe one of the reasons they are not as popular could be that they are harder to create but I am not sure. Prezi was created to create better presentations and not to takeover PowerPoint. It has been around for over eight years and has not taken over yet but maybe they will takeover the future of giving presentations as Augmented Reality has started in some other fields.
On a different note, Virtual Reality I am not too sure about. It may not scare me as much as it may Lance, but it does make me feel skeptical. This is a very new frontier that may have tremendous potential but in my eyes maybe not all for the good. As it is a very new medium in the industry, technology is its biggest hurdle right now. As we saw in the presentation in class, maybe at some point in time when the technology catches up with the new frontier we may not be able to tell where the game ends and reality starts. Although I know this is probably out a ways, there is definitely something to talk about when thinking about where to draw the line. The videos we watched depicted a man not being able to depict reality in the respect to even shooting games which could be all to real. If the technology ever came to this point where people stopped knowing where reality starts and stops is where I would start to get scared away from this. I know this may not even be possible but something to indeed think about. You already hear of it being real enough to make people feel sick among other things. With all of this said it could also be used as a useful tool in many other areas if it becomes more and more realistic. As we also heard in class it has already started to be used in some training aspects in some different fields, which could be a very useful tool where it could be monitored and regulated. In this part of the future of virtual reality, I am excited to see what it has in store for years to come but not yet sold on whether people should have systems this powerful in their homes.
