Since the start of another new year, we’ve seen
industry experts give their opinions on what will be the tech trends to watch
out for. However, some just seem to be throwing the latest gadgets into the events
space for fun.
For example, the comment from the Jan/Feb issue regarding
the Myo wearable armband, which will give presenters the opportunity to control
slides, sound effects and visual effects with the sweep of an arm, simply
struck me as misguided to say the least.
The average company bod making a presentation often
struggles to press the right button to move their PowerPoint on one frame. Ask
them to use slides, sound effects and visual effects, and they’ll be in real
trouble – tell them they must control it all by waving their arms and some of
them will freak out completely.
This is what’s becoming a classic case of tech for
tech’s sake. To me, it seems totally pointless – there is nothing wrong with
the wireless tools which are pressed once per slide, especially when you
consider outstanding presenters like Hans Rosling use said standard clickers.
Some presenters would even go as far as to say that
computers are temperamental enough. I imagine Martin Lewis (managing editor of
this magazine) would agree with me, given that the last time I saw him
presenting, his computer aide wasn’t playing properly – so adding another
technological risk into the mix with a wearable seems just plain daft.
According to Myo creators, ThalmicLabs, the armband
is claimed to let your content shine and leaves your anxiety behind knowing
that you are in control thanks to its intuitive gesture controls. Waving left
takes the presenter to the previous slide, a wave to the right jumps to the
next.
But even Oliver Richardson of DB Systems who made
the original comment, stated that with the Myo, ‘perfecting the right movements
takes getting used to.’ When you pair that with the findings from a recent
study conducted by human behaviour research lab, Science of People, the Myo
seems even more of a ridiculous addition.
The study looked into the science behind TED talks,
or more specifically, what makes them so popular. Half of the participants
watched the videos with sound, half watched them muted before rating each
speaker.
A correlation was found between the
number of views on a TED talk and the number of hand gestures – the most popular
videos had an average of 7 million views with speakers using an average of 465
hand gestures. The least popular talks had an average of 124,000 views with
speakers on average using 272 hand gestures.
These
natural hand gestures would surely include swiping side to side, so if the TED
speakers incorporated the Myo into their presentations, they’d run the risk of
jumping through their slides – not exactly the way to win over an audience.
The
findings also showed that speakers who use their hands to illustrate and
reinforce ideas came across as relaxed, confident and authoritative – something
that would surely be lost if the speaker had to focus using gestures to control
their presentation.
Originally published in M&IT