So: You’ve made something pretty freaking cool.
You’ve got five minutes to show just how cool it is.
You want people to talk about it, and ask you more…
You need an I-am-a-genius Product Demo presentation!
Johnny Chung Lee is a researcher into how humans interact with technology. He worked for a while for Microsoft (famously on the Kinect motion sensor kit) and, as of right now, is a ‘Rapid Prototyper’ for Google.
This talk is a demo he did in 2008 of motion sensor tech he’d put together mainly using a Wii handset, plus some cheap, easily-available infrared equipment. (This was pretty cutting edge at the time!)
It’s been watched more than 2,000,000 times, and I don’t think it’s just because of the technology being demonstrated. I think it’s also to do with how Johnny sets things up in his presentation.
To follow the Johnny Lee template, you’re going to need a new bit of kit/software you’ve developed that has at least three cool aspects to it.
The five-minute talk:
(Don’t be put off by the timer on the player saying nine minutes. The last four minutes are adverts.)
How to deliver an I-am-a-genius Demo Presentation like Johnny Chung Lee
Describe a wider context for what you are about to demonstrate
So as researchers, something we often do is use immense resources to achieve certain capabilities or to achieve certain goals, and this is essential to the progress of science or exploration of what is possible…
State the major downfall to the current situation
but it sort of creates this unfortunate situation where a tiny, tiny fraction of the world can actually participate in this exploration or can benefit from that technology.
Describe why that motivates you
And something that motivates me and gets me really excited about my research is when I see simple opportunities to drastically change that distribution and make the technology accessible to a much wider percentage of the population.
Set the expectation for how many ‘big chunks’ there are going to be
And I’m going to show you [two demos linked to] two videos that have gotten a lot of attention recently that I think embody this philosophy.
State simply the technology your demo is connected with
And they actually use the Nintendo Wii remote.
Briefly bring everyone up to speed re: that piece of tech…
Now, for those of you who are unfamiliar with this device, it’s a $40 video game controller and it’s mostly advertised for its motion sensing capabilities so you can swing a tennis racquet or hit a baseball bat…
And how you are aproaching the topic from a different perspective
…but what actually interests me a lot more is the fact that in the tip of each controller is a relatively high performing infrared camera
reinforce the number of chunks
and I’m going to show you two demos of why this is useful.
Briefly describe the set up you have, especially the bits we might not be able to immediately see
So here I have my computer set up with with a projector and I have a Wii remote sitting on top of it…
Describe the scenario that creates a need for this, setting the context for why your solution is so much better than the current one
…and if for example if you were in a school that doesn’t have a lot of money which is probably a lot of schools or if you’re in an office environment and you want an interactive white board, normally these cost about $2000-$3000.
For the first time state what you are going to demo
…What I’m going to show you how to do is how to create one with a Wii remote.
Describe any other additional factors using language at an appropriate level of detail/jargon, allaying concerns as you go
This requires another piece of hardware which is this infrared pen. You can probably make this for yourself with a quick trip to Radio Shack. It’s essentially got a battery, a button and an infrared LED. It turns on (you guys can’t see it but) it turns on whenever I press the button.
Describe in a few words what is going on and then demo the third most impressive aspect of the software, in a way that works visually…
What this means is if I run this piece of software, I can now register… the camera sees the infrared dot, and I can register the location of the camera pixels to the projector pixels and now, this is an interactive whiteboard surface…
…including why it’s so revolutionary…
for about $50 of hardware you can have your own whiteboard.
Drop in some comments on scope and quality of user reaction so far
The software for this I have put on my website, and let people download it for free, and in the three months since this project has been public, it’s been downloaded over half a million times.
Teachers and students all around the world are already using this.
Briefly preempt complaints
I do want to quickly say that although it does it all for $50, there are some limitations of this approach, but you get about 80% of the way there for about 1% of the cost.
Quickly up the ante, showing the second most impressive aspect of the product
Another nice thing is that a camera can see multiple dots. This is actually a multi-touch interactive whiteboard system as well.
Describe the parameters for the final demo, giving pertinent context as to why what you’re about to show is so cool
For this next demo, I actually have Wii remote here that’s next to the TV. It’s actually pointing away from the display, rather than pointing at the display. Why this is interesting is that if you put on a pair of safety glasses, I have two infrared dots on them, what these two dots are essentially going to give the computer an approximation of your head location.
And why this is interesting is I have this application running on the computer monitor and which has a 3D room with some targets floating in it. You can see it’s a 3D room, like a video game it sort of looks 3D. For the most part the image looks pretty flat and bound to the surface of the screen.
Demo the coolest aspect of the product, in a way we can clearly see the contrast
But if we turn on head-tracking, the computer can change the image that’s on the screen, and make it respond to the head movements, so let’s switch back to that.
Humbly describe industry/user reaction and reasons why this is such a great development
So this has actually been a bit startling to the game development community. Because this is about $10 of additional hardware if you already have a Nintendo Wii.
Look to the positive future developments
So I’m looking forward to seeing some games with it. Lewis Castle last week announced that Electronic Arts, one of the largest game publishers, is releasing a game in May that has a little easter egg feature supporting this type of head-tracking.
In less than five months, we’ve gone from a prototype in my lab to a major commercial product.
Optional: Use the platform to send a wider message
What was actually more interesting to me than either of these two products is how people actually found out about them.
YouTube has really changed the way, changed the speed in which a single individual can actually spread an idea around the world. I’m just researcher in my lab with a video camera, within the first week, a million people had seen this work, literally within days, engineers, teachers and students from around the world were already posting their own YouTube videos of them using my system, or derivatives of this work.
So I hope to see more of that in the future and online video distribution to be embraced by the research community.
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Lessons we can learn from Johnny Chung Lee
~ Create context before you demo: describe both the current situation and what they are about to see clearly enough for them to feel the impact of the demo as the demo is happening
~ Use contrast to make your developments stand out: leave your listeners in no doubt as to how much what you are demo-ing improves on the current offering
~ Build momentum: start with something cool, but end with something even cooler
~ Be humble: if you’ve made the contrast clear enough, and set the context, you can let the tech speak for itself
~ Use ordinary words: describe your project in words your audience find ordinary; if they are non-specialists, that means non-specialist vocab
~ Allow people silence to see what’s happening when your demo is on-screen, allow people time to absorb it; it’s the first time they’ve seen it
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Next time you want to show people what you’ve been doing, make sure you learn these lessons. Especially important is set context, use contrast and build momentum.
(This works if you want people to see your genius. If you want investment, you might need to work harder at relevance… Just a thought.)
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