Forum Discussion
Keep Articulate library character at a fixed point within 360 image navigation
Hello,
I am working on an eLearning course on a simulated bank robbery to have learners practice going through the correct steps when navigating a robbery situation. I have 360 images of the teller POV from behind our teller line in one of our branches, and was going to use a character from the Articulate library as our "robber". However, I want the learner to be able to pan around the "teller line" and choose to interact with objects such as their computer, their drawer, etc, but that means that the character/robber stays fixed in the center of the screen as they pan around, rather than staying in his spot as they navigate the simulation.
I have gone back and forth with Copilot and gotten a ton of wrong/impossible answers...surely I can't be the only person using a library character in tandem with a 360 image! Has anyone figured out a way to do this? I really feel like it shouldn't be this hard... I have images added of what it is looking like in practice.
Any guidance on workarounds or ideas to code something are very welcome!
4 Replies
Hi kmhahn,
If you embed the robber directly into the 360 image instead of adding him as a separate object in Storyline, he’ll look like he’s actually part of the scene, not just floating on top.Thank you for the reply! So it sounds like I would need to do that in another tool prior to adding the image to Storyline. Any tips on downloading assets from the Articulate library so I can do that with their characters? I tried copying the character into PPT so I could Save as Image (tried PNG & JPG), but it's very grainy/low quality when I then try to add it to my 360 image. I also spent a little time looking for other free libraries of stock characters but didn't have a lot of luck in what I was looking for.
You can export pose by right clicking on the character, and choose "Export Origianl Pose...". You will get a high quality png file then.
Joanne's suggestion will give you the best appearance, but at the cost of overhead to develop the graphics and limitations of a static image. There is another alternative that I was toying around some time ago. I refined it a bit for this question, but it is still a little rough and has some quirks. However, it has some potential for uses beyond your request so I will share it here.
With a little manipulation, you can overlay alternative objects over the markers that would normally be placed onto the 360 images. The markers have the advantage that Storyline already does some dynamic processing to track their positions to the position of the 360 image. If we attach another object, it can also dynamically track the image.
Basic demo: https://360.articulate.com/review/content/e799f9e8-b0a8-472b-b0e8-30375bd2f4aa/review
This approach works best when
- The object you want to fix to the 360 image is near the center of the initial view
- The object to fix is squarish or roundish.
If the object starts too laterally, then the perspective is exaggerated when tracking, which is not ideal. If the object is significantly longer in one dimension, then the ends tend to noticeably 'float' away from the background. Tall objects, like characters, look pretty good while panning from side to side, but vertical panning exaggerates the issue.
Aside from the characters you requested, this could be used to add other different types of tracking objects to the 360 image. State changes can also be used on the overlayed objects.
A limitation to this approach is that the 360 image markers allow minimal editing, and they cannot be directly removed from the display. They are actually incorporated into the canvas with the image itself. Removing them, if possible, would require quite a bit more investigation.
Perhaps the object positioning could be adjusted to better cover the markers with the objects.
