Revisiting the Player

Once more 'round the sun, it's the first edition of slashers' blog for 2021! This month, we welcomed a guest to our studio. Greg Pass, the founder of \Art program at Cornell Tech stopped by (virtually) and we had a chat through our idealization, implementation and progress of the two on-going exciting projects. We are thrilled that Greg loves our ideas!

Greg has also brought us some thoughtful input, including potential use cases for the apps, especially for the "unnamed nonlinear presentation/performance tool". As the nature of the project is essentially a software instead of an art piece, beyond the situation of assisting Devin's "performance essay" (link to some examples), an elaborated usage is for presenting the materials for a normal lecture. We think that this is absolutely a cool use case, and similar cases would potentially increase the audience of the software. So why limit ourselves?

Per request, we are adding a whole bunch of new features to the app, including:

• Text window with basic WYSIWYG, so a user can choose font/size/colors, etc. It saves the formatting/content on a per-window basis. Use case: if the user wants a written form of a question/quote for the audience to read themselves rather than just listen; if the user asks the audience a question and wants to note-take/brainstorm their replies in front of them. The idea that the canvas can change due to interaction with the audience is a kind of relevant nondeterminism.

• Thumbnail preview of URLs. If a YouTube URL is added, show the video thumbnail in the window. Use case: if the user is planning to show several video art pieces during a talk, a preview would be very orienting for the audience.

Additional tweaks and enhancements:

• Full-screen mode. Click a window to make it full-screen, then click to put it back to its original position in the canvas. Use case: play a video full-screen so the audience can see it better.

• Hotkey system

• List/grid view of the playlist

• All-draggable-collapsable components, place any component anywhere!

• Drag-and-draw at the same time

• New color schemes and design, potentially both light/dark mode

And along with some new exciting TODOs to join the roadmap:

• Audio recording of the lecture/performance

• Support of even more file types, PDFs, Word docs, slides...

• Read-only sharing. Share the canvas with the audience/students as a takeaway. Use case: sharing the "slides" with everyone after the class.

Entering Beta-test phase is super exciting for me, it's like giving life to your own creation! Thrilling as it is, it's also a perfect way to dig out hidden bugs and wrestle your brain against extreme and/or irrational user behavior. It's going to be great fun!

• For full user manual, please go to the repo

Kelly