Virtual Tours in Lectora?

jcobbley8757

My company is looking at doing some training involving virtual tours with 360 cameras. I have seen this done with tools like Storyline and Captivate, but currently Lectora is the only program I can use with my LMS, so I need to figure out if it can be done with Lectora.

Has anyone tried this? If so, best Virtual Tour software, tips, tricks, best practices?

If not, any ideas if I can or how I should begin?

 

Thanks.

Jessica

zliquorman1276

Storyline and Captivate should be able to create LMS-compatible content outputs like SCORM, AICC, xAPI, etc. Not that I want to talk you out of using Lectora...

...but I assume you want your virtual tour to be user-driven and interactive? As far as I'm aware, Lectora doesn't come with any built-in tools to assist with this type of project. That's not to say it can't be done, it absolutely could, but I'm not sure if it's worth the considerable extra effort if Storyline and Captivate are available to you which is why I mentioned above they should be able to output LMS-friendly files.

If anyone has tried this in Lectora, I'd love to see their efforts as well.

jcobbley8757

Our particular LMS is aging and only set up for Lectora at this time. That's not my specialty - I'm just the developer - but I have been told they aren't terribly interested in updating it right now so that I can use Storyline. I'd prefer to be able to use both tools, but right now it would take a lot of effort. Probably more than trying to make this work in Lectora. Lol.

Yes, I definitely want lots of interactivity and user-driven content.

zliquorman1276

Have you published any e-learning courses to your LMS prior to this project? If so, how did you do it?

If not, I would ask your LMS admins what that process is, and what format the published files need to be in. Most LMS' are set up to handle SCORM 1.2 packages. Being an old standard released back in 2001, I sincerely doubt your LMS predates it. Both Lectora and Storyline can publish courses in SCORM 1.2 compliant packages (among other formats). It's possible your LMS Admin team doesn't realize that Storyline can publish to the same format(s) as Lectora.

If they're only telling you, "The LMS is only set up for Lectora," I'd ask what that means. There are other ways to upload content to an LMS without using a standard format (why even have the LMS then?), but none of them are really unique to Lectora.

If you absolutely must use Lectora in the end though, interactivity is what is going to be tough. Lectora has built-in tools for displaying video content, but not much for actively manipulating it, at least in the way you would want for a virtual tour where a user can click/drag to change the view/location.

It may be a bit of a wasted effort to utilize 360 cameras if you're not using purpose-built software to utilize it, but using Lectora, you could set up the tour as a bunch of still images instead, with the user clicking buttons which correspond to a "new" location or angle (but would really be changing the picture to correspond to that location/angle). This is a ton of work if you want it to have a comparable level of quality to purpose-built software, since you're basically doing manually what other software does automatically (and lets you focus on making the rest of the content look good).

I can give an example of that in a sample .awt for you, if you'd like, but I really would try to press for an answer from your LMS Admins first. It really doesn't make a lot of sense to say, "It only supports Lectora," because Lectora isn't a format at all!

jcobbley8757

I will keep pushing for Storyline, because that does seem the easiest for what we are trying to do.

I was hoping maybe the forum would have a method to be able to get Lectora to do this just because that would take one piece of the fight off my hands.

If anyone does have one, I'd still love to hear about it.

jcobbley8757

What about this Cenario VR? Does it do the kind of thing we are talking about?