How to Use Gyroscope in Presentations, or Why Take a JoyCon to DPG2025

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This article explores how browser-based computational notebooks — particularly the WLJS Notebook — can transform static slides into dynamic, real-time experiences. This approach isn’t limited to presentations; you can prepare interactive lecture notes for students or colleagues and publish it on web. For data scientists, physicists, it highlights new ways to communicate models, simulations, and visualizations, making complex ideas more intuitive and engaging.

Is a PDF Enough?

Animations, bells and whistles, especially the kind that were popular in PowerPoint 15–20 years ago, have largely taken a backseat. Add to this the compatibility issues between LibreOffice and MS Office (even between versions for Windows and Mac), the presence or absence of necessary fonts — and the desire to do something unusual on the “stage” fades away quickly.

Have a look at modern technical presentations: quite often, it’s just a PDF document consisting of pages with vector and raster graphics, and sometimes GIF animations that eat up megabytes (like this post), with no mercy.

Unused Potential

It’s worth separating decorative bells and whistles from those that carry additional information in some media format. For example, take a look at ECMA-363 [1] specification.

A 3D model inside a PDF document simply enhances the user/viewer experience. You observe the object from different angles/cross-sections.

It’s disappointing that such a feature is almost nowhere supported except for Adobe Acrobat and likely will not be. It feels like we made a leap in the past, but now we have returned to static slides.

Large Scientific Conference DPG

DPG-Frühjahrstagung  is a large European physics conference organized by the German Physical Society (DPG) [2]. Every year, they gather more than 10^4 scientists and take place in German cities, covering a vast array of physics fields.

There are so many presentations, and it lasts almost a week, so by the end, it becomes too overwhelming. Nevertheless, this does not diminish its value as a platform for networking, practicing presentations, and a reliable way to learn what is currently on the market, which trains have gone already, and which are just departing.

The participants in plenary sessions are mostly Master’s students and PhD students, with postdocs being rarer.

Such a large and accessible platform is an excellent motivation to try something new Read More