Simon on: Technology and presentations

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