P2P victory

Advanced Reality has developed the Presence-AR Adapter for Microsoft PowerPoint that Advanced Reality says adds secure, real-time interactive presentation capabilities to any copy of PowerPoint. The Presence-AR Adapter for PowerPoint enables businesses to increase efficiency by allowing an unlimited number of users to collaborate in interactive presentations over LAN and WAN links using standard versions of the software, the company explains.

The adapter allows users to launch a secure peer-to-peer collaboration session where they can control their own uniquely identifiable pointers, chat with other participants and roam off the slide being covered by the presentation leader. Advanced Reality adds that the Presence-AR Adapter for PowerPoint uses a new technology called mutability that enables PowerPoint to transparently fail-over to another computer, allowing a session to persist even if the host signs-off or is disconnected. Further, says the company, the Presence-AR Adapter for PowerPoint uses new wavelet compression technology and file sharing protocols that eliminate the large file limitations, slow refresh and partial screen display problems.

The Presence-AR Adapter adds a number set of interactive capabilities, as well, including:

• telepointers, which assign all participants in a collaborative PowerPoint session a pointer identified with their name that they control for interacting with the presentation content;

• chat, which allows participants to send each other text messages, which are logged in chronological order identifying which slide was being viewed when the message was sent;

• whisper chat, which enables a user to send a confidential text message to a specific participant or group of participants during a session;

• roam, which allows participants to view slides other than the one being discussed by the presenter; and

• add new content, which enables any participant to bring new presentations into the session.

The Presence-AR Adapter for PowerPoint is available immediately and supports PowerPoint 2000 and PowerPoint XP/2002. Pricing for 15 non-transferable licenses, session directory software and relay server software starts at $1,295. Integration services for customizing the Presence-AR Adapter for PowerPoint and enabling collaboration between PowerPoint and other software applications are available from Advanced Reality.

The company also offers an adapter for Microsoft Excel.