Meeting environments, such as conference rooms, executive briefing centers, and exhibition spaces, are now commonly equipped with multiple displays, and will become increasingly display-rich in the future. Existing authoring / presentation tools such as PowerPoint, however, provide little support for effective utilization of multiple displays. Even using advanced multi-display enabled multimedia presentation tools, the task of assigning material to displays is tedious and distracts presenters from focusing on content. This paper describes a framework for automatically assigning presentation material to displays, based on a model of the quality of views of audience members. The framework is based on a model of visual fidelity which takes into account presentation content, audience members' locations, the limited resolution of human eyes, and display location, orientation, size, resolution, and frame rate. The model can be used to determine presentation material placement based on average or worst case audience member view quality, and to warn about material that would be illegible. By integrating this framework with a previous system for multi-display presentation [PreAuthor, others], we created a tool that accepts PowerPoint and/or other media input files, and automatically generates a layout of material onto displays for each state of the presentation. The tool also provides an interface allowing the presenter to modify the automatically generated layout before or during the actual presentation. This paper discusses the framework, possible application scenarios, examples of the system behavior, and our experience with system use. Even though multiple displays can facilitate a presenter to convey sophisticated knowledge to audience members and we are surrounded by multiple displays in many public places, existing presentation tools, such as PowerPoint, provide no support for multiple displays. To enable better use of media-rich environments, we designed EPIC, a tool for authoring and replaying presentations on arbitrary device configurations. EPIC complements, but does not replace tools used to author specific media. It can organize media prepared for simple devices and synchronously present them in one or more multimedia venues. For example, the EPIC system can import a conventional PowerPoint file and reauthor it for effective presentation on multiple displays. Our prototype supports arbitrary configurations of displays, printers, speakers and room lights. EPIC, which stands for Environment Picking Image Canvas, uses live or static images of the presentation environment as a graphical user interface (GUI). This allows users to visually select and control presentation devices, even in remote locations. Users may drag slides or media files onto a visual representation of the intended device. For example, a user can drag a slide thumbnail on top of any of the displays visible in Figure 1 to show a slide on that display. Additionally, EPIC supports virtual presentation previews. By displaying the selected slides ov...

In this demonstration, we are going to illustrate how to give a presentation using multiple displays connected to the Internet.

For some years, our group at FX Palo Alto Laboratory has been developing technologies to support meeting recording, collaboration, and videoconferencing. This paper presents several systems that use video as an active interface, allowing remote devices and information to be accessed "through the screen." For example, SPEC enables collaborative and automatic camera control through an active video window. The NoteLook system allows a user to grab an image from a computer display, annotate it with digital ink, then drag it to that or a different display. The ePIC system facilitates natural control of multi-display and multi-device presentation spaces, while the iLight system allows remote users to "draw" with light on a local object. All our systems serve as platforms for researching more sophisticated algorithms to support additional functionality and ease of use.

ePic is an integrated presentation authoring and playback system that makes it easy to use a wide range of devices installed in one or multiple multimedia venues.

This paper presents an information-driven online video composition system. The composition work handled by the system includes dynamically setting multiple pan/tilt/zoom (PTZ) cameras to proper poses and selecting the best close-up view for passive viewers. The main idea of the composition system is to maximize captured video information with limited cameras. Unlike video composition based on heuristic rules, our video composition is formulated as a process of minimizing distortions between ideal signals (i.e. signals with infinite spatial-temporal resolution) and displayed signals. The formulation is consistent with many well-known empirical approaches widely used in previous systems and may provide analytical explanations to those approaches. Moreover, it provides a novel approach for studying video composition tasks systematically.The composition system allows each user to select a personal closeup view. It manages PTZ cameras and a video switcher based on both signal characteristics and users' view selections. Additionally, it can automate the video composition process based on past users' view-selections when immediate selections are not available. We demonstrate the performance of this system with real meetings.