What do you do if you have to present your Vivien work to someone who doesn’t have a computer powerful enough to handle Vivien, or who can’t download and/or operate the Viewer?
It’s simple! In such situations, you can easily bring your own desktop to the other person’s computer and show them your work directly as if they were right there beside you by using desktop sharing technologies such as WebEx or GoToMyPC.
While such technologies are not part of Vivien itself, here are a few quick tips, pointers, and caveats for using them to your best advantage:
1. If your company has an account with an online service such as WebEx, GoToMyPC, or any other similar service, use it!
If not, it may be worth at least looking into what it would take to sign up because these services and their accompanying applications are designed to handle desktop sharing, and they’re are fast and very easy to use. There is almost always a cost associated with such services, but once the application is set up on your computer—usually a very simple installation just like any other application—it usually takes less than a couple of minutes for someone who doesn’t have Vivien/ Vivien Viewer installed and may never have even heard of the desktop sharing service you are using, to be ready to see your presentation!
Most of these services also offer teleconferencing as part of their packages, but of course your own phone can also be used for the voice part of the presentation.
2. If your budget doesn’t allow for such a service, there are some similar services available for free. The most popular among them are Windows Remote Desktop Protocol (or sim- ply Remote Desktop, which is included with all “Professional” versions of current Windows operating systems [XP, Vista, and 7], but not available with any “Home” versions) and variants of the Virtual Network Computing (“VNC”) system such as RealVNC and UltraVNC. While free and definitely worth a look, here are some things to bear in mind when considering these services:
• They’re not as easy and straightforward to set up as the applications for services WebEx and GoToMyPC; your IT Department, and possibly the IT Department of the person you need to present to, may have to be involved in setting up the connection, at least the first time around.
• Since these services/applications are meant for slightly different purposes, the speed of the connection between your computer and your client’s may be slower than with the services mentioned above.
• Both Remote Desktop and VNC are a lot less secure than the services mentioned above, and your company’s IT Department may prohibit their use.
3. If you have a relatively slow internet connection, you may not be able to use such services, whether you pay for them or not; ideally, you need a connection speed of at least 3Mbps in order to effectively use such a service—it is impossible to use one 
over a dial-up or even an ISDN connection. An important thing to note here is that some of the paid-for services will analyze both your connection speed and that of the person to whom you are presenting, and will scale the quality down (or up) in order to accommodate slower (or faster) connections. Such a feature is not available with either VNC or Remote Desktop.
4. Sharing an application means transferring a lot of data to the other computer. When sharing your Vivien work, especially when showing Virtual Views, you’ll be sending quite a bit of data so the person on the other end may notice a bit of a delay when you pan the Virtual View from left to right. While the image moves across your screen smoothly and without “stuttering”, don’t expect the other person to see the same smooth camera moves.
Depending on the connection speed (both yours and theirs), they may see the image “jump” a few times as you move the camera, or perhaps they’ll only see a new image once you stop moving the camera. This behaviour is common, as today true “real-time” desktop sharing connections can only really be achieved on fast, low-overhead local area networks.
Connection speeds are getting faster and so are technologies, so there is definitely hope that in the near-future such realtime desktop sharing connections will be achievable.
5. In the meantime, we recommend that you slow your presentation down a little, take more time to pan that camera, etc. Explaining what you are doing while you are doing it (for example, pointing out that you clicked on the drop-down in the Scene toolbar to change to a different design concept or room layout) will help the other person understand what’s going on, even if they can’t see all the changes on their screen.
Rendering – conceptual tent event