On Creating Animated Presentations

Computers are used to display visuals for millions of live presentations each day, and yet only the tiniest fraction of these make any real use of the powerful graphics hardware available on virtually all of today's machines. In this paper, we describe our efforts toward harnessing this power to create better types of presentations: presentations that include meaningful animation as well as at least a limited degree of interactivity. Our approach has been iterative, alternating between creating animated talks using available tools, then improving the tools to better support the kinds of talk we wanted to make. Through this cyclic design process, we have identified a set of common authoring paradigms that we believe a system for building animated presentations should support. We describe these paradigms and present the latest version of our script-based system for creating animated presentations, called SLITHY. We show several examples of actual animated talks that were created and given with versions of SLITHY, including one talk presented at SIGGRAPH 2000 and four talks presented at SIGGRAPH 2002. Finally, we describe a set of design principles that we have found useful for making good use of animation in presentation.