Navigating your way around online presentations has long been a standardized affair. You look at a slide, you click on the next button, you look at another slide. If you want to guide your audience through a linear experience, like that of a PowerPoint presentation, that works out just fine.
But what do you do if you want to give your viewers a non-linear experience? Maybe you want them to navigate their way around your portfolio, depending on which images they are most drawn to. Or perhaps you want to set your slides into a more visually appealing environment as you share them. Vuvox might just have the solution you're looking for.
Vuvox is very much part of a second wave of web application, intent on allowing you not simply to share your online media, but to present it in compelling and design-rich ways. If the first wave of Web 2.0 was comprised of services that made it easy for you to share your photos and publish your videos, this next wave of easy-to-use web applications is all about bringing your online media together, remixing them and presenting the results in beautiful looking compositions.
Joining these front-line tools, such as Scrapblog which lets you create visually rich, embeddable online scrapbooks and slideshows, and Splashcast, via which you can create your own media channels, Vuvox gives you a way to take your images and videos in a new direction.
Vuvox makes creating design-rich, interactive presentations a very simple prospect, and one you will be able to pull off in the space of a few short minutes. The process has three main parts to it, each of which you are guided through with simple pop-up dialogs.
In the space of a few minutes Vuvox lets you:
Import media from a number of online sources, or your own computer
Arrange your media into themed layouts and customize the look of these layouts with a range of design options
Publish the interactive results to your own hosted channel, or embed them in your website
The emphasis here is on importing images and videos that you have online, or on your own computer, and then placing them in highly customizable design-environments. These environments range from simple slideshow like set-ups in which the viewer can move from one slide to the next using a slidebar, to more complex and visually rich experiences, such as a 'media tree'.
With the media tree, your images or videos are placed upon the branches of a tree, and can be zoomed in and out of with a click of the mouse. This is one of several such innovative approaches to information design featured in Vuvox.
Video Highlights
In the following video clip, taken from the collection of clips featured in my full video review of the service, I talk you through the process of placing your media inside these customizable themes:
While these themes can seem limited on first impressions, however, each can be changed in numerous ways to suit your preferences, extending the look and feel of each well beyond its default settings. In the next clip I take a look at some of the customization options available:
In Short
Vuvox is not going to suit everyone's needs, for certain. This certainly wouldn't be the most effective way of presenting a data-rich, slide-driven presentation by my book. However, if you are looking to add interactivity and visual flair to your images and videos, putting together fresh and unusual presentations in the process, you may well want to check Vuvox out.
If you're still undecided, take a look at my full review at Master New Media where I break down each of Vuvox features in greater depth.
posted by
Michael Pick
on Friday, April 13 2007
Saturday, April 14 2007
URL of this article:
http://masterview.ikonosnewmedia.com/2007/04/13/web_presentations_go_interactive_with.htm
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