Prezi.com
Prezi is a nonlinear presentation editor, with a very intuitive interface and support for online sharing. With the help of Prezi you can create dynamic and visually structured zooming presentations using texts, videos, drawings, and present it as a very dynamic and free experience.
www.Prezi.com
Prezi could be particularly interesting for architects, as the system allows for presenting vector drawings on a projector, where one can zoom in and out easily.
We started this project in a very organic way; Adam and Peter, an artist/designer and a computer scientist have been lecturing extensively for many years, and due to the limitations of slide presentations they developed their own methods, scripted maps, to hold these lectures. Over time (last 4 years) this method matured, got refined, and only the most important features stayed.
At the same time, due to the many requests they got from their friends to use their presentation systems, Adam and Peter decided to develop a public software, which many more can use. Becoming coordinators at Kitchen Budapest medialab, a perfect context to develop something new, they found the needed time and atmosphere, so Prezi was born. After the proof of concept application, in 2008 Zui LTD was formed, the project received seed founding, and intense development has started…
Today we are a dynamic team of various experts with a strong international network.
Some history to start with..
Slides are transparent photos you slide into machines. They are not the ideas.
The ideology of Prezi is based our natural knowledge on how to coordinate ourselves in space; traditionally all information we have had to process and store used to be linked to physical space. That is where our minds have developed good skills in orienting ourselves. Despite all this digital information today is mostly presented to us as a moniker of printed matter. Of course printing has served us well to store (and shape) information for the the last six centuries, however, with the wide appearance of computing we saw the same old pattern: old forms got translated to new media without exploring its full potential. Most of the computer systems which present us with information today use the old paradigm of prints and slides: arranging information on a framed 2d static space. We could argue that these (at least their forms) are merely the side effect of Gutenberg’s galaxy.
This does not only help in orienting ourselves within, but also helps us to develop our ideas better.
Prezi is the message
Presenting or thinking? Function follows form.
Prezi is not about a simple effect of moving from slide to slide, using a zoomable space changes the way we work dramatically.
Ever since we started building ZUI presentations, we constantly have found ourselves wanting to use it on meetings where we have to develop ideas together, or while writing, where we need to keep the overall structure and the details in our minds at the same time, creating and working on a structured map would help out us a lot. Prezi can help you to create a map of points, structure your ideas, see overview and details at the same time. Throw in you keywords, images, videos, arrange and find out what you want to say.
And besides all this, ZUI offers infinite space.
Where innovation comes in
Zoomable user interfaces have been written about for a while, just as mind mapping is a practice for many in the creative industry. However, while being aware of all the software and scientific papers about this topic, we still found ourselves writing our own code to do something that is more simple, intuitive, fast, and looks beautiful as well; As both of us have an extensive background in presenting as well as idea mapping, we combine theory and practice, as we needed to do that already for our own needs.
Prezi is not a theoretical project, nor is it yet another office application; while being aware of the long term social aspects of using computers and sharing / shaping information, we worked down to the core to develop something very useful and simple, yet innovative and culturally intriguing.
With all this in mind, the work has just begun, there are still a myriad of possibilities lying ahead, mapped out for the near future.
