Remote

Inspiration

Since I have been at this Hackathon I have since people limited by the podium their laptop is placed upon. Even though they want to interact with the audience, they are drawn back by the fact that they need to control their slides. This has been a recurring thought in my head. With the growth of cloud computing and Internet of Things, isn't it possible to remotely control my presentations without been in-front of my laptop or have a wireless presenter or power point remote that only work for some specific device. Taking clue from how Spotify turned my phone into a remote control where I can control the music playing on my phone, I choose to convince myself at this Hackathon that it was possible to build one. My goal, build an MVP that shows that it works and that companies like Google and Microsoft which Google Presentation and Power Point respectively can take it a step further.

What it does

My hack, takes a device (I used my iPod) and through cloud computing and web sockets make it possible for me to change the slides on my browser while mentioning a consistent, clear and easy to use look and fill on the device.

How I built it

I the operating system I used was the Apple IOS 8.4 using the simulator for most of the testing. I was able to make socket communication with my "Presentation Slide" on the web through the Socket.io client for Swift. I simulated my slide by creating a simple HTML + CSS + Javascript + Socket.io page that allowed me to view images. The images where uploaded and stored on my server. My simulated presentation slide runs on a Virtual Machine (Ubuntu) on Microsoft Azure. I used Mongodb as my NoSql for my CRUD (well create and read) operations with respect to the storing of the slides and the receiving of the slides by both the device and the browser. My server was Node.js with Express + Socket.io.

Challenges I ran into

The first challenge was how to approach the problem. I didn't have control over Power Point nor Google Docs nor was there any api that made it possible to play around such idea. I googled ways of embedding a power point into the browser but that didn't give me the flexibility I wanted. I had no other choice than to resort to using images. Power Point allows you to save your presentation as a GIF. I didn't have not time to try this option out.

The second challenge was how to make communication close to real-time or instanenous as well as how would the application be designed to be easy to use. Finding that Socket.io was had a client for IOS was a huge relief as it had solved part of the problem. I still had to learn how to use it and how to make communication consistent. My though process of the design of the app and the presentation on the web was to bring together how music players are designed and how chatting works. This was how I implemented my hack.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

That I was able to complete the goal that I set out. Which is to build an MVP that its actually possible. Also the fact that I did a project in this short period of such interest problem that is need by most every one that will some day have to present to an audience with a computer