When the suits come visiting your GIS lab, it's nice to have a jazzy display script to explain your research and keep that funding rolling in. Here are some suggestions:
Start your script with a nice title page, overlaying colored text on a nice image. When displaying text in the GRASS monitor with d.text, note that the placement of text depends on the monitor aspect ratio (width/height), so you'll want to use the same aspect ratio every time.
For the actual show, you may want to put map displays, titles, legends, narrative text and other stuff in separate frames. A quick way of displaying a map's title might be d.erase white; d.title mapname color=black size=8 | head -5 | d.text. The text size (height) is specified as a percent of frame height. The Unix head command passes just the first five lines of d.title's output (including the non-displaying text color and size instructions) to d.text. You have a choice of frame background colors with d.erase.
If you want to include a high-resolution d.3d image in your script, you may want to get it saved as a raster screen dump using the CELL monitor, and then simply display the 3D screen dump image with d.rast (resetting the region to that raster image and running d.erase first). This will paint a lot faster than actually running d.3d in the script. On the other hand, the wave effect of d.3d running across the screen at low-resolution can be pretty cool.
You may want to display source data layers and then overlay raster maps to highlight cells meeting certain criteria. Overlay vector streams and roads as appropriate for visual referencing.
Use the sleep N command to pause the script N seconds as needed, e.g., to give the viewer enough time to absorb the information on the screen before displaying something else.
If you want to include brief audio clips to narrate parts of your script, you can record these with any standard audio utility on a PC or Sun workstation microphone, and then ftp these to Strauss (as binaries). The showaudio utility on Strauss will play these clips on the X-terminal speaker. You will probably want to play these sound clips as background processes, letting the audio narrative run as the screen paints. Include wait commands, which pause the script until its current background processes have finished, as needed to keep the visual display from running ahead of the audio narrative.
You can run your script from one X-terminal and have it display on a full-screen GRASS display monitor on an adjacent terminal. Start a GRASS session on the display terminal; start the display monitor (d.mon start= ); then unlock it (d.mon unlock= ) and exit your GRASS session leaving the monitor running. Now start a GRASS session on an adjacent command terminal, select the GRASS monitor (d.mon select= ) on the display terminal, and start the show. Use the display X-terminal's mouse to resize the monitor, do d.what.rast queries, etc..