The days of static Powerpoint Presentations are numbered. By static I mean stale content and primarily sequential presentation.

If you watched CNN’s coverage of the 2008 US Presidential Elections you will have seen their “New Toy”. An interactive touch display that takes presenting data to the next level. It is developed by Jeff Han of Perceptive Pixel.

It is great to see this technology appear in different mediums and not restricted to iPhones or Table Tops.

These days most computers have internet access. There is no reason why the content in presentations needs to be so static any more.

I think modern “presentations” will be much more fluid. There will be a primary sequence of points for the presentation but the presenter will be able to explore arguments by bringing up data, graphs, charts, photos, websites, screenshots, etc… completely interactively while staying completely engaged with the audience.

More importantly, you will be able to download the presentation later and view it again. You will be able to stop it at any point in time and interactively dig deeper into the data presented or look at the sources of the data to follow your own ideas.

When I went to the CNN website to check out the election section I was disappointed to see the data presented with basic flash objects on separate pages. It would have been nice to see the same “presentation” as was on the touch screen on TV.

There is still some technology missing to make interactive presentations the norm, like hand gesture capturing to control projected screens in lecture theaters but it won’t be long. In fact, there is probably already stuff out there that can already do all this. Let’s see it!

I am looking forward to the day when presentations are not controlled by powerpoint slides but rather follow the presenter’s experienced judgement of where the audience needs to be taken.