Idea for a cool AJAX-based project: a web-based slide projector

Thanks to tools like HTML Slidy and S5, you can build nice slide shows using HTML, CSS and some Javascript.

But what if you are lecturing at a distance? Imagine people get to watch you by videoconference while watching your slides. How do they know when to go to the next slide and so on? The solution, I believe, is to use AJAX. With a little PHP or Python based server-side script, you could control which slide must be displayed and anyone looking at your slide show would be automatically moved to the right slide.

That’s it. So simple. Anyone dare try it out? I bet it can be done with 200 lines of PHP and 200 lines of JavaScript, no more.

For extra points, make it so that the administrator can upload a picture (maybe using a webcam) which gets displayed in the right top corner, so that it feels a bit more like a videoconference.

Published by

Daniel Lemire

A computer science professor at the University of Quebec (TELUQ).

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