Slide layers

Hi Hal - and welcome to Heroes.

Basically, I always just ensure that there are sufficient instructions in the text/notes, or the voiceover, such as "Move your mouse around the screen, and when the cursor changes into a little "hand" symbol, click on the object to reveal more information". (or similar).

What exactly are you building, and how are you using layers?

Once again - welcome to the Heroes community.

Bruce

Hi Bruce,

Thanks.

We are developing courses in generic building science for sustainable housing. We are thinking of using layers to expose optional content if the learner wishes to know more.

For example, here is a text object on the base layer:

This section also discusses what is known as a Deep Energy Retrofit, a strategy that is becoming increasingly popular as a way to drastically reduce home energy costs.

The learner might wish to know more so the layer is:

The Deep Energy Retrofit Roadmap is designed to help you make informed decisions about what energy efficient upgrades to do your house, and what order to do them in. This is very important, because it is easy to 'short-circuit' long-term energy savings by going for what looks like an obvious upgrade immediately. The roadmap is broken into phases. Each phase stands alone, but should be done in the recommended order so that you can reach the biggest reduction in energy use possible.

There are a number of ways you could do this:

1> You could use layers, and just say "Click on x to learn more".

2> I have become a fan using "sliding text boxes" that appear at the top/bottom of the page when x is clicked.

3> You could route them off to another "Deep-Dive" Scene/Slide, then they could route back via a custom button when done.

4> You could use the "Process" interaction, so that they learn more by hitting the pre-built (but changeable...) buttons.

I did some of this recently in a course on sustainable construction when I wanted to get into the (optional) details of GSHP technology.

Hope this helps.

Bruce

Hi Hal,

What Bruce said - there are a number of ways to do this.

I'm a big proponent of visual cues and designing the screen intuitively where additional text or voice over is not needed. One thing we can draw from is trends and existing practices in other industries. For example, most folks are comfortable surfing the web. When they see blue underlined text they know it's a link and that link takes them to more information. No sense recreating the wheel when it's already there if you know what I mean.

Create a layer titled whatever you would like. In your above text, make Deep Energy Retrofit a hyperlink. Highlight that text and set a trigger to Show Layer. On that layer you now have essentially a full stage to use. Typically I'll create a shape that floats in the center big enough to accommodate the text. And I will add a small red circle button with a white X in the upper right corner of that shape. Again, the red circle with white X is a practice we all learned surfing the web - close this popup (layer). Be sure to set a trigger to Hide Layer > This Layer on that button.

Good luck!

I  agree with my erstwhile colleagues.

I often animate things in that can be manipulated, if I have a close layer button it often comes i a little later than everything else.

I try to look at GUI guidelines, if you can manipulate it often these objects have gradiants and drop shadows, (this gets me into another area where I get frustrated I dont like the default settings on drop shadows I believe they were created badly to ensure you change the settings, also if you use gradients ensure the light source is the same).

Thanks, everyone - the speed and quality of your helpful comments is just great.