The Three Foot Experience

Those in the digital living room arena, folks who make HDTVs and products that go onto them, talk about the 3 foot experience vs. the 10 foot experience. The 10 foot experience (shouldn't it be feet?) is the approximate distance from a person sitting on a sofa to their television.

Of course, with larger televisions, you can sit further back, but most people prefer the larger screens to better simulate the movie watching experience.

The 10 foot experience is contrasted with the 3 foot experience, which is really more like the 2 foot experience. This is the distance between the person and, traditionally, their desktop computer, though nowadays, their laptop.

Although people draw this distinction, there's one big advantage to the 3 foot experience. Zooming. And I don't mean a magnify that is implemented by software as some browsers do. I mean, leaning in to the screen.

I raise this point not because of TV or because of a computer but because I'm sitting in a RubyRx presentation. The presentation isn't the issue. It's how it the presentation is conducted. It's more like a movie experience.

Whenever you make a presentation, you make it so people can read it. Those in the back should be able to read it. Even if you sit in the front, it should be viewable. A computer screen can use very tiny letters because people can "zoom" in by just leaning in some more. At the very least, they might be able to use their browser to zoom in on their own to read things more clearly.

Edward Tufte complained about this. He's an expert in presentation software. He says traditional presentation can be too content-rich, but due to the nature of the projected "slide", the user can't zoom in closer. The presenter is limited to presenting what everyone can see, and therefore dictates what the viewer can see. They are in control, and the viewer can't experiment on their own.

Indeed, he suggests a few more low-tech way to present a talk. Give handouts. Of course, he believes that handouts should take advantage of the two dimensional structure of paper and its inherently high resolution. You should, he suggests, take a great deal of time to make a nice presentation rather than the rushed presentations that makes everyone's presentations look like everyone else's.

However, I don't see that changing much until either the software for presentation is changed or until the problem has just been rethought. For example, suppose a presenter could present something onto a sandboxed screen on your laptop. If they would let you move around during the presentation, then you could interact with the presentation on your own, independent of the presentation.

One reason this is unlikely to happen, other than the software needed for this, is the time it takes to prepare a presentation. Once upon a time, you had a chalkboard, and perhaps some written notes on a piece of paper. You couldn't do anything fancy with a chalkboard. Can't use too much text, because it's a pain to write. Can't draw elaborate diagrams. There are so many limitations that it forces the presenter to do very simple things.

Indeed, if the presenter knows something about the subject matter (or not) and doesn't need to prepare, they can present right away with no preparation. While this is a bad idea, there are many presenters that are more than content presenting with no preparation (i.e., they are lazy or great, but usually not both).

Presenting is a passive experience. The problem with making it more active, that is, allowing viewers to participate, is the viewers may not want to participate, and they may not be all equally able to participate. They might not understand the task you've set forth. They may find it trivial. They may lack the right software. And even if everyone can participate, it slows everyone down. You have to wait until they get done.

In a standard presentation, you talk about it, and if people don't get it, they can figure it out later on (or not). And with a laptop, you can do something completely different (like me, I'm blogging).

Presentation software has gotten trivially better, but apparently, people haven't really given it as much thought as they should. For example, developers of TextMate (and most editors) have yet to create a presentation mode with the text font suitable for viewing.

Anyway, back to the presentation.