Kiosks
Kiosks |
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David S. Martin, MD, FACR has reported no financial interest, arrangement or affiliation with a commercial organization that may have a direct or indirect influence in the subject matter of this presentation.
Contents
For this year's article, we want to go beyond the classical introduction to PowerPointŪ. We have introduced the basics of the program in previous years (please contact the ASNR to obtain these papers). The discussion this year will teach you how to use the program to create an automated slide show. This can act as a screen saver or as a stand-alone kiosk for you to use to display anything you wish.
For those unfamiliar with the term, kiosk, they are the automated information displays often seen at science museums, malls, and occasionally in other public displays in order to allow passers-by the opportunity to read the information. Occasionally, they may be semi-interactive. Then, the museum patron can choose information on some portion of an exhibit, see the schedule of exhibits, view a map of the museum, or see an advertisement trying to entice them to become a member or friend of the museum. In the mall, the shopper might be able to see a display of the mall map with stores of interest marked.
Included with this text are three displays. Kiosk 1 and Kiosk 2 are suitable for an office waiting room. One is an explanation of the services and people for an outpatient radiology office while the other is a version of a display, which campaigns for tort reform. Kiosk #3 is the first series of slides introducing the suprahyoid neck. Presumably, it could be used as a "handout" to residents or fellows. Each of them can be accessed using PowerPoint or PowerPoint Viewer. As they are configured, the displays will autorun until the escape key is pressed. If the keyboard is not available to the audience, the kiosk will run until stopped by an authorized individual.
Presentations were created in the usual way by making a set of slides with common background and content that includes title slides, bullet slides, image slides and graphics. The content, order and appearance were edited in the usual way as well. The final slide in the presentation should indicate that the kiosk will recycle. The difference between the common lectures that you have made and the self-running kiosk is the use of transitions and animation within slides. To make the show even more advanced, voice clips could be added to give narration or sound clips could be inserted to allow for background music. However, this is for another PowerPoint talk. Transitions determine what happens between slides while animations determine the action within a slide. This is NOT the same thing as using image animations. Image animations are files that are embedded in the presentation and run during a slide show as a single object. PowerPoint animations of slides will cause chosen objects to animate. In other words, PowerPoint animations allow ALL objects on a slide to be animated while image animation only animates ONE object that has been embedded in a slide.
Transitions are accessed from the slide show menu. This is the drop down menu selection from the top left row. You should determine one transition effect for all the slides in your show and stick with this for uniformity in presentation. It is very distracting when each slide is presented with a different visual cue. If you are so inclined, make a 13-slide presentation and then make a transition effect for each slide. Notice how distracting it is when you view it using the F5 function key to start a show from the first slide. One can also start a show from wherever slide you wish by using the screen show icon on the bottom of the screen. If you REALLY want to be distracted, use the random transitions button; each slide will have a different and unpredictable transition. So, try different transitions; choose the one that suits you; and apply it to all slides. If you want your kiosk to run automatically, chose the timed transition. Here, you will have to try some variations to determine what pleases you the most. The transition dialogue box looks like Figure 1 and has a number of options. We will go through each in turn from top to bottom.
Figure 1
An icon gives a preview of the effect in the upper left (hand pointing left). There is a drop down menu of possible transitions with names ranging from blinds to wipe in alphabetical order (black arrow). Immediately below this are three timing radio buttons (grayed out in this illustration because no transition has been selected). Thus, if you choose wipe and slow, the wiping action will be more majestic or if you choose fast, the action will be very quick. The only way to learn is to try. The red rectangle encircles the Advance options. If you want interactivity, the slide transition will only start after the mouse is clicked if the upper choice is checked. If the automatic is checked, the slide transition will start after however many seconds you put into the box after you have checked the "automatically after" radio button. Immediately to the right of the Advance section is a drop down box that can be used to access various sounds when transition is supposed to occur. The "loop until next sound" radio button will cause the sound to play over-and-over until another sound is encountered. Use this sparingly, if at all, to give your kiosks more appeal. In the upper right hand corner (hand pointing right) the three buttons, from top to bottom, apply the transition to all slides, just this slide, or cancels the animation from being put on the slide.
To access custom animation, choose the same slide show drop down menu and choose custom animation. Unlike transitions, you cannot apply a custom animation to all slides; you can only animate each slide and each object on each slide independently. Choose one animation for an object and use it repeatedly because you are trying to keep the viewer concentrating on your content not your animations. The custom animation dialogue box is slightly more complicated.
Figure 2
In figure 2, there is a custom animation dialogue box. Note that there are 4 areas of interest. In the top right hand corner are three buttons labeled "ok", "cancel", and "preview". The okay button saves any changes to the animation of objects on a slide. The cancel button does not save any object animation. The preview button will show what animation of the object chosen will look like on the mini screen of the slide. The area of the box marked "check to animate slide objects" contains all the objects created on the slide from the title to any graphics, sounds, movies, etc. Each one has a radio button. If checked, that object will have an animation. If not checked, the object will appear on the slide as it is first shown. In the rounded rectangle, there are 4 additional tabs labeled "order", "effects", "chart effects", and "multimedia settings". We will discuss order & timing and chart effects in this paper. Order and timing allows you to animate objects in an order different than they were originated on the slide. The object will start its animation either on a mouse click or automatically after however many seconds you put in the box. The starting of animation is done by filling in one or the other radio button.
Figure 3
Figure 3 shows the custom animation dialogue box with one of the objects chosen and the effects tab also chosen. The effects tab shows what entry animation will be used which can vary from flying in to appearing or zooming. Try them and see what you like. You can have various preprogrammed sounds or you may use any wave file as a sound to play. Obviously, if you are using sound, you need to have your sound card enabled and not muted. (This minor detail has frustrated many a programmer!) There is also a pull down menu for what happens after the animation. This can be anything from changing color to disappearing. Changing color can be very useful to keep the viewer focused on reading ahead but causing what they are reading to disappear can have disastrous consequences if the viewer becomes frustrated enough to begin throwing things at the computer. Although grayed out on this box, the introduction of text in bullet slides can be grouped by line, word, or letter. If there is an attached shape at the end of the letter, it too can be animated. Although it is not clear to me when this is useful, there is animation in reverse order (Be careful of frustrating your viewers). Of note, often, one will have the last line of an animated bullet list appear and then the next slide will come on to soon and not allow the last line to be read. To avoid this, I always create an invisible object that can animate for a certain time after the last text. To do this is easy. When making a slide, insert a small drawing object such as a square on the slide. Then hide it by changing its attributes to No outline, No fill color. To get to the attributes, choose the shape by right clicking on it and choosing to edit object properties (see figure 4)
Figure 4
Figure 5 shows the attributes you need to change.
If you change both the fill color and the line color to the background shade or simply choose "no color" or "transparent", the object will disappear on the slide but it will still be visible in the list of objects on the custom animation screen. Then, one can "animate" the invisible object for as long as one needs so viewers can read your content in peace.
It is VERY important that you use the slide show view to review your timings or you may either frustrate your readers or put them to sleep when animation timing is too fast or too slow.
To make the presentation run automatically each time you start it, you need to make it into a slide show. Again, access the slide show drop down menu. This time access the "set up show" choice as in Figure 6.
Figure 6
Then, simply click the appropriate radio buttons (see figure 7). For our purposes, click the "Browsed at a kiosk (full screen) radio button and also click "Loop continuously until 'ESC'. If you want all the slides shown, click the "all" radio button. If you want only some slides shown, click the "From" button and choose the slide numbers you want. You can choose a "custom show" that may have slides out of order. Slides can be advanced manually or use the internal timings that you created with animations and transitions. Obviously, you will want to use the timings you created. Notice that if you had wished, you could have created and used narration with your slide show. If you wanted to have some background music playing during the slide show, this would be how to do it. Put the music on the first slide as an animation. Then, in multimedia settings, choose to allow the slide show to continue. Stop the recording after the first 1000 slides and it should play continuously throughout your kiosk.
The name of the kiosk presentations are: Kiosk #1, Kiosk #2, and Kiosk #3.
Enjoy.
Figure 7
Copyright © 2004 American Society of Neuroradiology, www.asnr.org