Transitions are often used in presentations to break up the presentation and to keep the audience awake, but often the outcome is irritation/distraction with text or other objects flying on or off the screen from different directions. As such they should be used sparingly if at all in a talk. LaTeX beamer has a simple mechanism for including transitions in a presentation

Fast Tube by Casper

To use this transitions pdflatex needs to be used to create the document as a pdf file and the presentation needs to be viewed in full screen mode to observe the transitions. Adding a transition on a slide is as simple as adding a command like:

transdissolve

to the slide. This transition disolves the contents of the slide. The LaTeX beamer user guide has further information about the transitions that are available.

Other useful resources are provided on the Supplementary Material page.