Live demo deck
A presentation
that talks back
Every feature in here is running right now. Not a screenshot. Get your phone out in two slides.
RUKUS Impossible to ignore
The problem
A deck is a broadcast
You talk for forty minutes. The room says nothing back.
You read the faces in the front row and guess at the rest. You walk out with a handful of business cards and no idea which line landed.
The fix
Their phones are already out
They scan what is on the screen. No app, no sign up, no name.
Every phone follows your clicker. You press the arrow, their screen changes.
The whole thing is a single HTML file. It runs off a stick with the wifi off.
What follows is every part of that, one at a time, with what each one costs when it is missing.
Join the room
Point your camera
at the square
Or type this in
rks-bww.pages.dev
Room code
• • • •
Feature 01
The room opened itself
Nobody pressed anything. Landing on the last slide opened the room, minted the code, drew the square and started listening.
On stage you are holding a clicker and nothing else. Any feature that needs you to find a button on a laptop is a feature that does not happen. The slide it fires on is read off the markup rather than hardcoded, so re-ordering the deck cannot break it, and one failure stops the trigger instead of firing a request at every slide for the rest of the session.
Feature 02
The first thing it asks is trivial
One button on the phone. I am in. That is the whole ask, and the number moves while they are still looking at it.
The room watches the loop work before anything is riding on it. It is also the fastest read there is on whether your projector is talking to the same room they scanned. A count sitting at zero while eighty people tap is a problem you now find in seconds instead of at the first poll.
Feature 03 · live poll
What do you actually do when a deck goes up?
Answer on your phone.
Feature 03
One phone, one vote
The bar you just watched climb counts people, not taps. A second press hands back the vote they already cast instead of moving the bar again.
A poll a room can stuff is a poll you cannot quote. And the answer beats anything you could have asserted from the front. You did not tell them what the room thinks. The room told itself, out loud, in four seconds.
Feature 04 · anonymous questions
Ask the one you would not raise a hand for
The button is on their screen right now. No name is asked for and none is stored. It lands as the question and nothing else.
Try it. It shows up over the top of whatever slide I am on.
Feature 05
Questions stack. They never eat each other
Cards pile up, newest at the bottom, capped at two while they are sitting on top of a slide. Anything past the cap gets counted out loud: 2 more questions waiting.
Nothing is ever dropped silently.
One slot. Three questions landing inside the same three second poll marked all three as seen and showed only the last. Two of them were gone, and the people who asked them watched nothing happen.
Feature 06
A click of the clicker cannot kill a question
A card tracks how long it has actually been on screen, not how long since it arrived. Advance the slide and it comes with you until that time is spent.
Cards are sized like a headline, not a caption, because you have to read it out loud from ten feet away.
A client advanced roughly every sixty seconds. A question landing late in a slide got a few seconds of screen time and then turned into a counter. The room typed it. Nobody read it out.
Feature 07 · the room's own numbers
How big is the biggest room you present to?
Type a number on your phone.
Why it matters. Every phone did its own arithmetic and the wall shows the room to itself. Median, not average, so one person typing 50,000 cannot drag the answer.
Feature 08
The code comes back on one key
Press C, or the button bottom left. The join code throws itself back up, full bleed, over whatever slide is on.
People walk in late. The square lives on one slide near the top and no presenter is going to page backwards to it in front of a room, so without this every latecomer is locked out for the rest of the session. Full bleed and modal on purpose: a code in the corner cannot be scanned from the fourth row, and a panel you can read past invites the room to keep reading the slide.
Go on. Press C.
Feature 09
When the room goes quiet, the deck shouts
Two reads in a row with nobody in the room and this lands across the screen. It says four things in this order: what is wrong, why it probably happened, the move that fixes it, and how to make it go away.
It is always dismissable. A false alarm you cannot clear off a projector is its own disaster.
Three laptops each quietly opened their own room. The audience scanned one, the projector drove another, and every poll bar sat at zero while 83 people tapped at a screen nobody was reading. Twenty minutes, in front of 88 people. Every fault was invisible from the front.
Feature 10
And then it hands you one button
The alarm asks the server which other room on this deck has the phones in it, and rewrites itself.
A warning that only tells you something is broken makes it worse. You are standing in front of a room, so you need the move, not a diagnosis. One press and your laptop is driving the room they actually scanned, with their votes and their questions already in it. Taking it over rotates the key, so the other machine stops driving instead of fighting you for the slide number.
Feature 11
Two rooms cannot open in the first place
A second open on the same deck is refused, and the refusal hands back the code that is already running plus how many phones are in it. Opening two on purpose takes one flag, because two presentations in an afternoon is a normal day.
The alarm on the last two slides is the cure. This is the vaccine. Both exist, because the cure cannot help when the second room opened before you walked on stage.
Feature 12
The dangerous buttons ask twice
Close the room and New room both arm themselves when there are phones in the session. The first press turns the button into Again? 58 here and it disarms itself if you walk away.
One press of Close ended a session with 83 people in it, four minutes in. Re-opening mints a new code, so every phone that had already scanned was stranded on a dead one. An empty room still goes through on the first press, because there is nothing to lose. And it is never a browser dialog: a modal on a projector reads as an error, and you are holding a clicker, not a mouse.
Feature 13
The head count does not lie
A phone counts as present if it checked in inside the last 45 minutes, and it checks in again the moment the screen wakes up.
45 minutes, not 15.
The heartbeat is a timer in a browser tab. It is throttled in the background and it stops dead when the screen locks. A pocketed phone was falling off the count while its owner sat in the room, and a session with dozens of people in front of it read 4. The empty room alarm reads this same number, so a tight window makes it shout at a healthy audience.
Feature 14
The screen stays awake
A web page does not stop your laptop's screen timeout the way PowerPoint does. It has to ask. This deck asks, and it asks again every time the tab comes back, because browsers drop the lock silently and never restore it.
A client presented from a link and spent the session jiggling the mouse
so the screen would not go black. Going fullscreen does not fix it. There
is a fallback for browsers without the API, and you can check which one is
holding the screen live, in the console: window.__keepAwake.
Feature 15
Nothing on screen unless something is wrong
There is no phone count in the corner of these 26 slides. No status light, no connection pill, no reassurance.
That silence is what earns the alarm the right to be as loud as it is.
A live count on every slide is furniture. It costs attention on all 26 of them and it is only useful on the one where something has broken. The count belongs on the join slide, where the room is looking at a number on purpose.
Feature 16
If a person can tap it, it writes a row
There is a button on your phone right now that does nothing except get counted. Tap it.
A client's closing slide had a save my number button that was a plain link with no handler on it. After a session with 58 phones in the room there was no way to answer how many people saved his number, and no amount of digging brings it back. A tap nobody wrote down is gone. Buttons, downloads, contact cards, outbound links, scans: every one of them counts people rather than taps, and lands in the same table as everything else.
Feature 17
It still works with the wifi off
Fonts, artwork and the QR encoder are all inside the one file. No CDN, no font host, nothing to fetch when you open it.
You cannot assume a ballroom has wifi, and you cannot assume the venue's guest network lets a laptop reach an API. With no room, no signal, or a server that is down, the deck behaves exactly as it did before any of this existed. The poll slides show their question instead of four bars pinned to zero, and a cold load makes zero network requests. The live layer is an upgrade, never a dependency.
One more poll
Which of these would you use first?
Answer on your phone.
Feature 18 · the wall
Every question you asked is still here
Rebuilt from everything the server holds, not from whatever happened to be on screen. The ones that flashed past mid-session are all on this slide.
Why it matters. The retirement window is a display rule for a card sitting on top of a slide. On the wall it is simply wrong, and a Q&A slide that comes up empty in front of a room is the most expensive bug in this whole list.
The wall · page two
And the overflow has somewhere to go
Ten to a page, measured against real renders rather than chosen. Eleven questions are ten and one, never ten and a shrug. This slide skips itself when there is nothing on it.
That is the whole spine
Your brand, your content, your room. This one is a demo because here the features are the content.
Head count, every vote, every question, every tap, with the session archived so the next one starts clean.
One link, or one file on a stick. Your room needs a camera and nothing else.
dmerrill@createarukus.com · createarukus.com