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Showing phone demos to an audience

Showing mobile phone applications during a presentation is always a challenge. The screen's are too small to just hold up, so you need to project them just like you'd project Keynote or PowerPoint from a laptop. To do this, my ideal setup is to have two projectors, with one connected to my laptop and the second connected to an over-head camera, like an Elmo, that can zoom in and focus on the phone screen. This gives the flexibility to show both screens simultaneously, which is particularly important when demonstrating applications that communicate with a desktop machine (the bluetooth console on Python for Series 60 being a perfect example.) Unfortunately, having two screens, two projectors, and an Elmo isn't very likely, so my latest experiment is to run it all off one projector, using an Apple iSight to bring the phone screen onto my desktop. It seemed like a great idea, but I've still got some glitches to work out.

The first issue is simply a matter of screen real-estate. For example, I gave a presentation today and the projector was only able to handle 800x600. That's a little tight to have a Terminal shell, notes, and the iSight camera screen all at once.

The second problem was just finding a way to display the iSight's output. Using the video window from iChat AV was the natural guess, but you learn pretty quickly that iChat flips your image as if you were looking in a mirror. (I tried to come up with a reason why Apple would want to do this, but I really can't think of one other then simply preventing people from doing real video conferencing over iChat.)

Fortunately my machine came with iMovie which will also allow you to display the camera in a window. Using iMovie for this is quite nice since the camera window is particularly large and properly oriented; However, iMovie won't run in 800x600, and will quit when you switch to that resolution.

Given the above limitations, I thought I was going to be SOL for my presentation today, but thankfully I remembered one more application that can display video -- the Quicktime Broadcaster. Quicktime Broadcaster (which is free) uses a much smaller preview window, but that's not so bad on a cramped screen, and at least the image isn't flipped.

With the camera's output properly displayed, the next limitation was in keeping the phone's back-light on. This is important because the iSight will automatically tweak it's aperture setting when the light goes out, which will then wash-out the screen when it comes back on, slowing everything down while you wait for the screen to come into focus again. The solution comes from the ever-handy FExplorer utility. FExplorer is really a file browser, but it has a few random features buried in the options menu, one of which will keep the back-light lit until you tell it otherwise.

The final issue with the iSight is that the auto-focus will sometimes get confused if you don't have anything on the phone screen (ie., if you white-out the whole screen the image goes fuzzy.) But this is a pretty minor issue for the convenience of being able to bring all the equipment you need to run a presentation.

-- [Update: 2005-04-11]: A reader sent in a recommendation for ImageExpo -- a phone display solution that uses either a Bluetooth connection or a USB cable to send the video to a Java app on the PC. It supposedly supports Windows, Linux, and OS X.