How to show your ppt slides in realXtend

Posted by on January 28, 2009 under Ideas, howto | Read the First Comment

First reaction of many people to virtual worlds is that they begin to think about possible applications. One of the most common idea is the meeting application.

It is so strongly in peoples minds, that if a virtual world platform does not support some basic technology enablers for the meeting use case, the platform is considered useless.

The key technology enablers for successful virtual meetings are:

• Application sharing
• Document sharing
• Web co-browsing
• Spatialized voice support (3D audio)
• (Powerpoint) Presentations
• Streaming real time media
• Customizable avatars and rich interaction

I believe that moving our current 2D User Interface paradigms to virtual worlds is only an intermediate step towards true 3D applications. In true 3D applications brainstorming, training, planning and many other (collaborative) activities are not done in front of flat virtual screens. The real 3D approach takes current strengths and weaknesses of virtual world technologies into account (as I wrote in an earlier post - Virtual world advantage over real life).

But for now, it is still important to get basic things working as people have tons of legacy Powerpoint presentations and other 2D material. Follow the following steps to use your ppt files inside realXtend:

1. Open your .ppt file in OpenOffice Impress, check the slides that everything looks good
2. Make a new empty folder for the resulting files
3. Select file->export, type “rexslides.html” for the file name and “export as html” to the new empty folder
4. Select “New design” -> next -> “Webcast“
5. Now you can select ASP or Perl solution, depending on your web server platform - Perl should work for most - the rest of the steps assume perl. You need a web server for this to work; CTN recommends http://www.hosting24.com
   
6. Set URL for listeners to “index.html” and presentation URL to “http://www.cybertechnews.org/webcast/” and URL to perl scripts to “http://www.cybertechnews.org/webcast/perl/“
7. In the next screen, use jpegs and set the resolution to highest: 1024×768, in the next dialog you can save the design if you wish
8. copy txt files to the /webcast/perl/ folder at your web server, and set them writable (permissions to 666)
9. copy pl files to the /webcast/perl/ folder at your web server, and set them executable (permissions to 755)
10. copy all the other files to /webcast/ folder at your web server

Now you are ready to use the presentation in realXtend. Just use a texture’s media URL property, set it to http://www.cybertechnews.org/webcast/ and apply the texture to your favorite object.

To control the presentation, open a web browser and point it to http://www.cybertechnews.org/webcast/rexslides.html

Browse the web together in realXtend

Posted by on January 25, 2009 under Ideas, howto | Read the First Comment

Collaborative web browsing plays an important role in meetings. Meeting rooms have usually data projectors so that people can plug in their laptops and show slides, documents and web pages to support their message in a meeting.

In realXtend 0.4 it is possible to show web pages with live flash content, like a Youtube video (see CTN article about that). The web page to show is defined in the texture properties as a media URL. 

However, it is a bit clumsy to use texture properties to change the web page when there are lot of people attending a meeting and possibly wanting to share something.
CTN built a server side solution to the problem using PHP and javascript.

Follow these steps to test the solution:

1. download php and html files (unzip webscreen.zip) and upload them to your web server (if you don’t have a web server, get a free hosting from http://www.000webhost.com/. For professional use CTN recommends http://www.hosting24.com.)
2. set texture’s media URL to http://www.cybertechnews.org/webscreen/webscreen.html (use your own server name here!) and apply the texture to a cube
3. open a browser window to http://www.cybertechnews.org/webscreen/seturl.php (use your own server name here)
4. write a URL (e.g. http://www.realxtend.org) to the text input field and press enter, after a few seconds, the web page shows in realXtend viewer, and the same web page is shown to all participants in the virtual world at the same time.

Extra benefit of this approach is that people who do not have realXtend can also follow the presentation from the same URL using a standard browser (you can test it by using the CTN URLs in the steps above).
If you wish to have several webscreens showing different content, it is easy to copy the same web files to another folder at the web server to separate URLs. To develop the solution further, learn the tricks from this book.

The next topic will be about how to share your Powerpoint slides in realXtend - stay tuned!