Well worth showing off

Have you ever had difficulty displaying a well log in a presentation? Now, instead of cycling through slides, you can fluidly move across a digital, zoomable canvas using Prezi. I think it could be a powerful visual tool and presentation aid for geoscientists. Prezi allows users to to construct intuitive, animated visualizations, using size to denote emphasis or scale, and proximity to convey relevance. You navigate through the content simply by moving the field of view and zooming in and out through scale space. In geoscience, scale isn't just a concept for presentation design, it is a fundamental property that can now be properly tied-in and shown in a dynamic way.

I built this example to illustrate how geoscience images, spread across several orders of magnitude, can be traversed seamlessly for a better presentation. In a matter of seconds, one can navigate a complete petrophysical analysis, a raw FMI log, a segment of core, and thin section microscopy embedded at its true location. Explore heterogeniety and interpret geology with scale in context. How could you use a tool like this in your work?

Clicking on the play button will steer the viewer step by step through a predefined set of animations, but you can break off and roam around freely at any time (click and drag with your mouse, try it!). Prezi could be very handy for workshops, working meetings, or any place where it is appropriate to be transparent and thorough in your visualizations.

You can also try roaming Prezi by clicking on the image of this cheatsheet. Let us know what you think!

Thanks to Burns Cheadle for Prezi enthusiasm, and to Neil Watson for sharing the petrophysical analysis he built from public data in Alberta.

Comments

[Maitri]

This would be great as a space-saver in corporate email in which you can't stuff huge Powerpoints because of size limits. Also really cool for logical flows of thought while still keeping all the information on the same page. Big picture --> small pictures --> big picture.

[Matt Hall]

@Maitri: Interesting thought. I like the idea that we should be able to pass ideas and examples around without having to select and limit data like we tend to do in PowerPoint. It's more 'honest' to give some pointers but expose everything, should the recipient be interested. This is one of the reasons I much prefer live data presentations in a viz room to static, low-res PowerPoint where I decide ahead of time what people get to see... and not see!

[evan]

@Maitri: Thanks for the comment. I love tools that align with how we think. It seems like more of a image playground versus a slide documenting system found with other tools.

[j]

Prezi is a great format to communicate ideas & analysis from a log. I've seen countless cross-sections with 20 logs lined up in PowerPoint and there isn't enough resolution to see any log character.

My experience with using new tools in the "coporate" environment is that ANY deviation from "conventional" tools creates such a distraction that often times the content is overlooked. That shouldn't discourage us from continuing to push to use new things, but I find it depressing sometimes that there are additional useless barriers to try new things in a corporate environment. Don't even get me started on Corporate IT's role in new technology....

[Matteo]

Hi Evan
This one too looks very good:
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/deep-zoom/
Matteo