For people who want to do their presentation as a poster/panel presentation, there are at least two good ways you can achieve this.

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You could create a PowerPoint file that moves around your large poster as you discuss the work you have done. It would probably be good to start with an image of the entire poster, and then zoom into the various sub-sections so that the viewer can read your text and see your graphs and tables easily as you talk. If you already have the entire poster in a single digital image (like a big JPEG file, or PNG or something like that), then you can drop that into PowerPoint directly. If you do not yet have a single file that contains everything, but you have all of the separate pieces, you can bring them into PowerPoint separately and organize them into the format of a PowerPoint slide. Here is one YouTube video that shows you how to do that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WnhoIbfcoM. You don't have to follow all of her suggestions (she's a bit picky on details); but she does show you how to get everything into a single PowerPoint slide.

 

To move, pan and zoom around that slide as you talk, you will need to know how to use the Zoom tool in PowerPoint. Here is a good video that shows how to do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGqHSvs9qpE. 

 

Once you have the slides working in the way you want, you will need to work out the narration: what would you like the viewer to know as they look at each section of the poster? This can be exactly the things that you would say if this was a "real" poster session and someone walked up to you and your poster and said "So, tell me what you have done here?". For most of us, our presentations work out better if we actually have a script, i.e. we write out our comments so that we know exactly what we want to say and how we want to say it. With a script, you can practice your narration, and figure out the time that each slide needs to be on the screen. This is explained here.

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You could do it all using Adobe Acrobat if you've got your poster presentation into a single large PDF file. In Acrobat, under the View tab, you can go to Full Screen mode (Ctrl-L). Once you are in Full Screen mode, holding down the Ctrl and + keys at the same time will zoom in, and holding down Ctrl and - at the same time will zoom out; and you can pan (move side to side and up and down) using the mouse (like you were dragging the image). So right in Adobe Acrobat you could show your poster, starting with the whole thing on the screen, then zooming in to the part you want to talk about first, saying what you want to say, then zooming out or panning over to the next section you want to talk about. All of what happens on your screen, and what you say, can be captured in a video file using one of many different pieces of software that do screen and audio capture. This is explained here.

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Most people who have done virtual poster session prefer to create them as a PowerPoint file because they can get their zooms and pans exactly right. Doing it in real time in Acrobat can be a bit clumsy. The other advantage of doing it in PowerPoint is that PowerPoint gives you tools for pointers and highlighters so that you can draw the viewer's attention to specific items. In Acrobat, with something like OBS Studio capturing the screen, your mouse will show up, so you can use that as a pointer; but the PowerPoint pointers are better (they look like laser pointers), and they also have highlighting tools.

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If you need any other suggestions or advice, please feel free to send a note to the Questions e-mailbox.

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Good luck!