How Strut's Spatial Presentations Differ From Regular Slide Decks

Strut is an open-source tool for building spatial presentations: you place content on slides, arrange those slides in 3-D space, and present by flying a camera through that world. The difference from a regular deck is structural, not cosmetic. A conventional deck is a one-dimensional sequence — slide 1, then 2, then 3 — while a Strut presentation is a navigable space where the path through the material is a design choice you make, not a constraint the format imposes on you.

The core difference: sequence vs. space

In a linear deck, the order of slides is the presentation. The audience sees one frame at a time, and meaning comes from accumulation along a single axis.

In Strut, slides are objects positioned in 3-D space. The presentation is a camera flight through that arrangement, so the audience sees slides in relation to each other — near, far, above, below — before and after the camera settles on any one of them.

What "camera flight" actually changes for the audience

Presenting as a camera flight means the transitions carry information. Moving from one slide to another can show the audience where the next idea sits relative to the last — a zoom out to reveal a cluster, a pan across a row of related points, a dive into one detail.

That is the practical payoff of the format. In a linear deck, a transition is dead time. In Strut, the movement itself can communicate grouping and hierarchy, which is why the tool describes itself as built for "ideas that don't fit in a straight line."

When a spatial presentation is the better choice

Strut's format earns its keep when the relationships between ideas matter as much as the ideas themselves. For example:

• A roadmap where several workstreams run in parallel and occasionally intersect.
• A system or architecture overview where components sit at different levels of abstraction.
• A research summary where findings cluster into themes rather than forming one chain of argument.
• A pitch where you want to zoom from a wide market view into a single product detail and back out.

A regular deck still wins when the content genuinely is a sequence — a step-by-step tutorial, a chronological narrative, or a talk where each point depends on the one before it. Forcing spatial structure onto linear content adds navigation cost without adding meaning.

What stays familiar

The spatial format does not throw out slide conventions. You still place rich content on slides, and the tool is positioned as "everything a deck should be" — so the unit of authoring is still a slide, not a free-floating 3-D object. What changes is how those slides are arranged and traversed.

Strut also supports generating slides from a description, auto-arranging a deck, and editing by chat, grounded in your content. Those features matter more in a spatial format than a linear one, because arranging slides in 3-D by hand is the part most likely to slow you down.

Availability and cost, as stated

• Free tier — $0: unlimited public decks, shareable links, present and export, and AI using your own OpenRouter key. You can also self-host the open-source app for free, unlimited and private.
• Pro — $2.50/mo per user: private decks, a custom share domain and white-labeling, unlimited hosted image storage, and AI with your OpenRouter key.

The entire app is open source, so self-hosting is a real alternative to the hosted plans rather than a trial. Signing in to go Pro is handled through GitHub or Google.

The short version

A regular deck answers "what comes next?" Strut answers "where does this sit?" If your material has a natural order, a linear deck is simpler and faster to build. If your material has a shape — clusters, layers, parallel tracks — arranging slides in 3-D space and presenting as a camera flight lets the structure itself do some of the explaining.