I've never been a big fan of Powerpoint dating back to my training as a speaker in the 90s. The audience should be focusing on you and what you are speaking about, not on reading your script and looking at pictures on a screen. If you must use PowerPoint, you should follow Guy Kawasaki's 10-20-30 rule for Powerpoint, no more than 10 slides, no more then 20 minutes, and font no smaller than 30 points.

Instead, if I am using visual aids in a presentation, I prefer to use tools related to the presentation. When I speak about social media, I like to use Buffer to send preloaded tweets out to Tweetchat using a hashtag. The key points still get displayed on the screen, the audience gets more of a chance to interact and it illustrates using the technology.

On Thursday morning, I will be doing a presentation introducing a group of librarians to Google Glass. So, the challenge I came up with for myself was, could I use Google Glass as a replacement to Powerpoint.

The first issue was to find a way to present what is on the screen through a projector. I've done presentations using the screencast capabilities of the Glass app on my smartphone. This works very well if you are presenting to a small group that can gather around the cellphone, but for a larger crowd, finding some way to connect my smartphone to a projector was called for.

My first attempt was to use the old TV Out approach. My current smartphone is a Samsung Galaxy G4. Some Samsung phones, like several other phones, have the ability to display to old fashioned televisions, and many projectors using a cable that plugs into the headphone jack. I have a cable like that I've used on other phones, but I couldn't get it to work on the G4. My guess is that there is a setting I need to enable, which I haven't been able to find. Any suggestions are appreciated.

The second idea was to use a MHL cable. MHL, or Mobile High-definition Link, is a micro-usb plug on one end and a HDMI plug on the other. You can use it to display what is on your phone screen on a high definition television. I don't watch much television, so we don't have HDTV and I don't have any MHL or HDMI cables. I must admit that I haven't looked, but it seems like most times I've done presentations, the projectors accept RCA input (the old fashioned TV connector), or VGA input (the standard for PC monitors), but HDMI inputs are far from ubiquitous, so finding a RCA or VGA approach would work better.

My next thought was to try and find some way to connect the cellphone to a laptop and connect the laptop to the projector. I've connected other android phones to my laptop using the USB cable and running Android Development Tools, ADT, on the laptop. The Samsung G4, like many smartphones, does not default to having debugging enabled. How To Enable Samsung Galaxy S4 USB Debugging provides good instructions on how to do this.

However, when I connected the smartphone to my laptop and started ADT, I got a message that the Samsung Galaxy S4 was offline. It took me a while to figure out what the problem was. With newer versions of Android, there is security added to the device. You need to permit the specific laptop to debug the phone. I was using Android Debug Bridge (adb) version 1.0.29. This version does not support this type of security. When I upgraded to version 1.0.31 and tried to enter debug, a message popped up on my smartphone asking if I wanted to allow the laptop to debug the phone. I said yes, and dab started working.

The Dalvik Debug Monitor Server (ddms) provides the ability to display the screen of the android device on the laptop. However, this only works for single images. To be able to see the screen as it changes, I downloaded Android Projector.

Getting Android Projector to work also required a few steps. First, I needed to make sure I had a current version of Java running on my laptop. Then,, I started adb and authorized my laptop to debug my phone. Next, I started ddms and connected to my phone. With ddms running, I then started Android Projector. The screen came up nicely. I rotated it to match the orientation of the Glass app screen cast, and then hooked my laptop up to a projector and I could display what I was seeing on Glass to the whole room.

The one caveat: it tends to lag by three to five seconds between when a card comes up on Glass and when it makes it to the projector. An aside: I could have put Glass into debug mode and connected the glass directly to the laptop. I tried this, but then you need to remain connected via a USB cable, which ties you down and loses some of the effect.

With this in place, I could now display how Glass works on the projector. The next step was to put a presentation up on Glass. I've been doing a little bit of Glass development and have created GlassDeck. It allows you to create a bundled deck of cards as a timeline item. It is written in PHP based on the quickstart Mirror API guide. It is still fairly primitive. I wrote it mostly as a programming exercise. You can save your GlassDecks and share them with others. If you log into GlassDeck, you can find my presentation at 106686438536671985498:Presentation. Even if you don't have Glass, you can see the HTML that I used to create the cards. If you do have glass, you can edit it and create your own presentations.

This is all fairly primitive still, but has potential. I look forward to refining my GlassDeck app, finding easier ways to display Glass on a projector, and perhaps even using a remote for Glass at some point. Remotte is creating one such remote that might be useful for doing presentations using Glass.

So, Thursday, I'll do a presentation using Google Glass. I'll let you know how it goes. Let me know your thoughts on ways to make doing presentations using Google Glass even easier.