We've been confirmed for a talk at the
CCC retreat on August 10. Let's put on a good show.
Presenting in Realtalk
I'd like for us to try giving the entire presentation in Realtalk.
Before CDG, all of my talks were live demos, but ever since going "in the world", I've had to show photos and videos. I miss demoing, and I'd like to be able to start doing it again. And even for photos and videos, dealing out cards in Realtalk will be a lot more fun than Keynote.
Back at Dynamicland, we gave a few lectures in Realtalk (such as Luke's TTI/V talk), but we've never done a lecture-hall presentation in Realtalk outside of the lab. We had started planning an extravagant one for the Stanford HCI Seminar in April 2020, but then COVID.
The Stanford demo was to be a
Penn & Teller style double-demo, where we first gave a presentation on some example topic, using Realtalk as the medium, and then repeated the same presentation as a meta-presentation, building it up from scratch and explaining how Realtalk works. We had a lot of trouble choosing an example topic, and never really settled on one before the cancelation.
Fortunately, we now have a wonderful not-just-an-example topic to cover. The upcoming talk won't be a double-demo -- the focus should remain on the science, not on Realtalk itself -- but it's a step towards an eventual talk on Realtalk-as-a-medium.
Setting up Realtalk in the lecture hall will only work if the venue is cooperative, but I hope it'll work out -- this is a "home team" game (Shawn is a
member of the CCC), the talk is nearby in Tiburon, we can come a day early to set up, and hopefully also visit a few weeks early to scope it out like we did with the Stripe talk.
It will take some preparation to figure out how we'll show what's on the table to the seated audience. There may be a over-the-shoulder camera-person, for example. We may want to mix that feed with a projection from Realtalk itself (for photos and videos), or just switch between them, or there might be multiple screens. If video mixing is required, maybe we can do it from Realtalk itself. (When presenting
Stop Drawing Dead Fish, hands had to be visible to the audience, in addition to the video from the device, and the
logistics got complicated. Hopefully this will be less complicated.)
Outline of the presentation
Probably something like:
- Bret gives a brief background on Dynamicland and what Realtalk is, so people have some idea of what they're looking at.
- Shawn gives an introduction to DNA origami and his lab's projects.
- Brief review of last year's prototypes (maybe just narrating over the video, as usual).
- The main event: Bret and Shawn (together) present Autobreak-in-Realtalk.
"Dynamic presentation" goals
My goals are to give a lecture-hall presentation in Realtalk where we:
- make use of space (e.g. putting dynamic things up on walls during the talk) instead of being crowded into a single rectangle
- use a dynamic timeline to contextualize the events we describe
- bring in evidence and data as visible, persistent objects
- demonstrate something using physical materials with our hands
- explain a process by playing out a dynamic model
- create a simulation/analysis live by putting together programs/math with our hands
If we manage to do anything that hits most of those goals, that will be a huge success and advance.
The main event
See next email!
