16 August 2012

iPoster

Sometimes, no graph can substitute for a good video. This is particularly true in the field of animal behaviour and neuroethology. As I mentioned previously, I was just at the Tenth International Congress of Neuroethology, and I saw a few people trying to bring video to their poster, including me.

On my poster, I did two things. First, I snitched a lot of tacks and used them to mount an iPad.


Several people thought this was brave of me. I knew it would work, because I had seen Bradley Voytek do this at last year’s Neuroscience meeting. With enough tacks, and new poster boards, that iPad was in there solidly. It wasn’t going to hit the floor unless the entire poster board went over.

Because I wasn’t by my poster at all times, and I didn’t want to leave my new iPad unattended, I printed a QR code to the video behind the iPad:


I was kind of proud of this, because I planned ahead. I used some good practices in the text (telling people exactly what the code was). I left just enough space so that this would be concealed when the iPad was in place.

Other presenters were also using iPads, but mounting them in different ways. The next two photos are from the same poster, on different days:


On day on, the presented used the iPad cover to act as a sort of lanyard arrangement.


By day two, the presented decided just to hang the iPad over the top of the poster board frame. Now this was what made me nervous.

I discovered one minor little problem with using an iPad to show people video, though. I would have liked for the video to be showing continuously, looping, so I didn’t have to be fiddling with it anew for every poster customer. There is no way to do that using the normal video app in the iPad. You have to resort to a few hacks to get looping video.

Another person, not wanting to risk an expensive iPad, just used a digital photo frame instead.


But as long as you can have someone by the poster, the risk to putting you iPad on the poster is minimal.

Related posts

How to show a dung beetle running
More power! The poster with a plug

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