ProtoSphere 1.4 Feature Peek: Presentation Boards let you display and share content on the fly

Our engineers have been hard at work on ProtoSphere 1.4, and have made some improvements to the dynamic billboards feature we showed you a couple months ago. It's evolved into Presentation Boards. They appear throughout the ProtoSphere environment on any surface, including walls, whiteboards, easels, screens, etc., and provide the ability to display and share content to anyone that enters those spaces.

But now we've created two types, Single-Slide and Multi-Slide Presentation Boards. Single-Slide Presentation Boards let you display image files and text. Supported image formats include .jpg, .jpeg, .gif, .tif, .tiff, .png, .bmp, .tga, and .dds. You can also add text to the surfaces using the editor function. These surfaces are useful for agendas, announcements, note-taking, navigation signage, or other types of branding and personalization.

Multi-Slide Presentation Boards serve the same purpose, but they have the added benefit of being able to support multiple slides of content. So you can present PowerPoint slideshows (.ppt and .pptx) right in your ProtoSphere environment.

I've put together a video to demonstrate the Presentation Boards below:

Tony O'Driscoll and Karl Kapp's 3-D Learning Archetypes in ProtoSphere

In Karl Kapp and Tony O'Driscoll's new book, "Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration," they describe 11 "3-D learning archetypes." These archetypes are what they consider the core ways organizations can use 3-D immersive environments for learning. Or in Karl's words, "These archetypes are some of the most effective methods of designing instruction to maximize the accordances of virtual spaces."

We're creating a space inside of our public demo version of ProtoSphere to demonstrate these archetypes. Karl and Tony will also be using it as part their promotional efforts for their book. Last week, I shared with Karl some screen caps of the progress we're making. You can take a look at them below too.

ProtoSphere 1.4 Feature Peek: Dynamic billboard

One of our objectives with our blog is to leverage it as a way to provide our readers with insight into what our developers are working on in their "bat cave," and what might be coming down the pike. We're calling these insights "feature peeks." We'll be rolling out short videos that show you each feature peek as we develop them.

As a word of caution, I want to let you know we can't guarantee that everything we show you will make it into the next version of ProtoSphere, the version after that, or even at all. However, if something you see really blows you away, tell us in the comments. And likewise, if you think something is not so great or important, let us know too. We always strive to create our platform with our end users in mind, and if we're not meeting your needs, then we need to know!

So, without further ado, here is our first feature peek, Dynamic billboard. It's currently slated for the ProtoSphere 1.4 release. Dynamic billboards let you place text or image-based content onto whiteboards in your ProtoSphere environment. You can also drag and drop images from your desktop to the whiteboards.

This allows for persistence of that information. The content is always there until you take it down or swap it out for something else. It also lets you customize your environment on the fly.

We're working on developing support for many more file types, including Microsoft Office documents, .pdf's, other image formats like .jpeg, and video. This also opens the window for users to do remote desktop sharing, right in their 3-D space.