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60 minutes to ship · May 2026

The TV was sleeping.
The event wasn't.

An event booth experience designed, built and shipped in under an hour.

z z z Move cursor

Standby. So I made it wake up.

60min

to go before the booth opened

2dead ends

before finding a reliable approach

<2sec

from idle screen → presentation

01 — The problem

A sleeping TV doesn't look ready.

The booth had two TVs meant to showcase product presentations.

But when nobody interacted with them, they went to sleep.

And when a sales rep wanted to show something?

Desktop → find PPT → open → wait → presentation mode.

Too many steps.

Too much dead space.

Too much opportunity for the experience to feel unfinished.

The presentations weren't the problem.
The transition into them was.

Sleeping TV

→

Desktop

→

File

→

PowerPoint

→

Presentation

5 steps · in front of a clientStep 1 of 5

02 — The constraint

There was one hour.

No backend.

No server.

No time for a proper application.

So I started with the simplest thing possible:

One HTML file.Opened in Chrome, full-screen

Draft 01

First attempt

Persistent presentation sidebar.

Problem

It felt like a kiosk.

Decision

Hide the controls until they're needed.

Controls always on screen

AIMTREX

Hover to reveal Always visible · no hierarchy

03 — 20 minutes in

PowerPoint didn't work.

.pptx Browsers can't render PowerPoint.

So I tried PDF.

.pdf Chrome blocks local PDFs in iframes. No server, no way around it.

Two approaches down.

So I stopped trying to make the browser understand presentations.

I made the presentation something the browser already understood.

Pkeynote.pptx12 slides

→

01.png

02.png

03.png

04.mp4

05.png

06.png

07.mp4

08.png

Slides became images.

Video slides became MP4s.

←→ navigate Space next Esc back to idle

04 — The final experience

Move the mouse.

00:00:00 AIMTREX Move the mouse

Select presentation

Try it. A working replica of the booth screen — move the pointer, pick a deck, use ← → and Esc.

Controls appear.

Choose a presentation→Open→Present

~~No desktop.~~

~~No browser chrome.~~

~~No loading screen.~~

Just the content.

05 — What actually shipped

From this

Sleeping TV
↓
Desktop
↓
PowerPoint
↓
Presentation

Fumblingin front of the client

To this

Idle
↓
Move
↓
Choose
↓
Present

< 2 secidle → presenting

The final build, live at the Aimtrex booth

Live at the booth. Both screens running from a single HTML file and a folder of PNGs.

Draft 01Structure

First draft — two-panel layout with a persistent sidebar

Draft 02Brand

ShippedOn demand

The deadline wasn't the constraint.
It was the design brief.

With an hour to go, there wasn't time to build the perfect system. So I focused on removing the friction that mattered most. What shipped wasn't technically sophisticated. It just worked when it needed to.