Our mission at Uptrends is to help create a better internet. In our series “Kickstart Progress,” we take a look at the newest, coolest crowd-funded technologies. This week, we take a look at Voiceboard, a new way to interact with your slide presentations.
Voiceboard, “the future of presentations,” is a Kickstarter project by an Armenian company called Lionsharp. Our last Kickstart Progress feature covered the Fizzly Smart Tracker.
Voiceboard Kickstarter Campaign page
Campaign Goal: $45,000
Campaign End Date: 1/11/15
What is Voiceboard?
The Voiceboard creators describe Voiceboard as “the world’s first voice and gesture controlled application for making your presentations unique and impressive.” After taking a look at the project page and video further in detail, we have to describe it as a “Minority Report interface for PowerPoint.” And that is pretty cool!
(For those of you who don’t know what we’re referring to, “Minority Report” is a futuristic science fiction thriller starring Tom Cruise. In the film, computer interfaces are controlled using hand gestures and voice commands.)
What can Voiceboard do?
The Voiceboard product comes with what Lionsharp is calling a “Nod Ring,” a mixture between a wireless slideshow clicker and a motion sensor, a wireless Bluetooth microphone and headset, and a copy of the Voiceboard software.
The three combine to create a unified presentation experience, empowering presenters to control and interact with their presentations using voice and gesture controls.
Voiceboard’s unique software enables presenters to import existing PowerPoint presentations, and enhance them with integrated, interactive maps, webpages, and 3D modelling capabilities.
But the promise of Voiceboard doesn’t lie in just the futuristic looking hardware, or the feature-rich presentation enhancing software. It lies in the potential for seamlessly blending the two to help you focus less about the technology, and focus more on giving a rich, natural presentation.
Think about it: one of the most stressful parts about giving a presentation to coworkers, bosses, communities, and friends – whatever – lies in the anxiety that something that you can’t control will go wrong. With voice and gesture controls, Voiceboard helps to make interacting with your presentation feel more casual, tangible, and organic.
Our thoughts
The idea of interacting with a slideshow instead of blindly clicking, and minimizing windows to access websites, maps, etc. seems like a dream come true. There is nothing worse than preparing a PowerPoint presentation and having to worry about where you will stand, finding extra batteries for your wireless clicker, or having an extra person to man the controls for you. It just seems like a natural next step for helping to give presentations.
Do we think that Voiceboard can solve all of the issues that current wireless presentation tools, or even software provides? Maybe, maybe not. It is an extra cog in an already existing engine – as fancy as it is. Who is to say whether it will work seamlessly enough for any technophobe?
But maybe that doesn’t matter. The idea is sound (and gesture), so why not reach for the future and bring it now?
Do you like the sound of Voiceboard?
Go check out the Voiceboard Kickstarter Campaign page and tweet @UptrendsMonitor to let us know!
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