In the past, when we used the term “video” in a discussionof eLearning, we generally meant a medium involving capture of sequences ofimages into a recording that had a beginning and an end, edited to a specificlength. In the near future, video will mean truly dynamic interactive video. Videowill be created “on the fly,” not locked into a sequence, and under the controlof the user or of software.
Computers and smartphones have changed the way we create andview video. We know that. Video is moving to strange new lands where nothing willbe as it appears. OK, in video nothinghas ever been as it really is. Not since the 1950s, when video first started tochange our society, and certainly not now. It used to be that video had to berecorded to 16mm film. For live-camera video recording we had to wait until the1960s. And video could only be shown in one format; black and white. Before the1960s, video was filmed on a device known as a kinescope where a film camerafaced a video screen (very small) and film was recorded at 24 frames persecond. Then when it was shown back on your television set, it was convertedback to 29.97 frames per second (don’t ask why). It was insanely analog.
The invention of commercial videotape in the 1960s changedeverything. Live TV shows could be recorded and played back at a later time. ThinkThe Tonight Show: recorded around 5 PM,then played back at 11:30 PM. This was a breakthrough. Early video recorderswere huge, used two-inch wide tape, and took a lot of skill (learned!) tooperate. Fast forward: Today there are a plethora of options for recording andplayback. It makes my head swim given all the options. We can make video inalmost any form, format, or shape if it’s a rectangle of some sort. We’re also beginningto make virtual reality (VR) video, which has some incredibly interesting applications. We’re attempting to make real interactivevideo as well, albeit with less success on many levels. Most of the realapplication of VR in eLearning is in the future. First, I think I need to sharemy definition of interactive video.
Interactive video’s current state
The “interactive” video we create in eLearning today isn’treally interactive at all, in my opinion. The interactivity we use today iswhere we stop a video, ask a question, then go on to the next thing or repeatwhat the learner didn’t get right. Or we allow the viewer to choose whathappens next. None of these approaches is truly interactive to me. Yes, it’s a bit moreimmersive than passive just-sit-back-and-watch-it video. But interactive?Minimally at best.
There have been some videos made that are highly interactivecompared to stopping the video, asking some questions, then starting the video.Notably, the Resuscitation Council dida video series several years ago that was highly interactive. It was done inFlash, which is now deceased, of course, but the video lives on (I had to allowFlash content to be shown in my browser for this site) and is still far beyondany other interactivity I’ve seen or found in many searches.
There’s no easy way to create more interactivity than wecurrently can in Captivate or Articulate. You have to keep it simple. Say whatyou want about Flash, it certainly helped creativity and allowed video contentcreation with a lot of interactivity. Now that Flash is pretty much gone, interactivityhas to be written in HTML5 and it’s difficult to create. There are no reallygreat tools with user interfaces that developers can easily understand. But theResuscitation Council’s video lives on in Flash.
Adobe Animate (the “new” Flash) will write yourinteractivity to HTML5, but it’s spotty at best, in my experience. While thecurrent state of interactive video leaves a lot to be desired, at least to mymind, it has to get better and it will soon. As an aside, remember that whencreating an interactive video or interactive anything, the images, video,animation, whatever, are just the beginning of your project. Creating eLearningcontent is getting complex!
Real dynamic interactive video (or animation) is a techniqueprimarily used in gaming and not in training. In gaming, a FPS (first person shooter)game is one in which the player reacts and interacts with their environment.Sometimes the environment interacts with the player, and in general, you wantto keep it so you’re interacting with the environment. Almost all games requirea level of interaction that’s almost never achieved in learning and eLearning. Gaming,serious games, are the rage right now in eLearning. But games with a high levelof simulation fidelity don’t have a wide application in many sorts of training.
In several important ways, VR is more of a niche in trainingright now than a mainstream application. Virtual reality and augmented reality(AR) are becoming the new video currency. VR, by its nature, needs to create a 360-degree sphere of video around the viewer or learner and the learnerstill needs to put on a “face brick” to hold a smart phone or other displaybefore their eyes. Right now, the technology to create simple VR is easilypracticable for eLearning video production. 360-degree cameras are gettinginexpensive and software is getting easier to use. As of this writing, Samsunghas a 360-degree camera that sells for less than $150 and can be sometimes foundon sale for less than $100. The software to stitch the video streams (two ofthem, front and back) together comes with the camera, or you can use PremierePro to stitch the video streams together when there are four or six (or more) cameras.
Augmented reality is different. A whole lot different. Itsdefinition is fuzzier. There are so many things that people consider to beaugmented reality. So, what is it exactly and how can it interact withinteractive video production? That is, as they say, a loaded question. There’sno clear definition of augmented reality. It can be many things. One thingmight be moving an object from one environment that is live in front of youimmediately into the scene on your computer screen. And that’s just one tinything. Without a clear definition it’s hard to pin down anything that augmentsreality, since just about everything we interact with augments reality in someway. Watching TV (or your computer) augments reality. Listening to the radioaugments reality. Now we’re getting sensors and other things that can augmentreality. Fun to think about. Not everything is easy to, or is ready to be, implemented.
Interactive video’s immediate future state: Virtual reality
While writing this article, I was at an event where I got to“play” with the next generation of immersive (read interactive) video. All Ican say is “holy smoke.” Interactive video will soon be, um, truly interactive witha few caveats.
Currently, we mostly employ interactive video to, say,choose between a few objects in Captivate or Storyline. For the most part thevideo stops are simple, not 360 degrees, and we can make a choice (thequestion) and the video starts again. There used to be far more complex actionsavailable in Flash … but it’s gone. It’s not coming back. You can do the samekind of interactivity in HTML5, but you need a programmer to help you do it.What did I see that has me thinking that our ability to make good VR and ARvideo will exponentially increase over the next few years?
Start with the Samsung 360 camera. It’s lower in price (anda bit lower in video quality) than in the past, but it’s easier to stitch thefront and back video loops together than ever before. And it’s not at allexpensive, hooks right into the Samsung Galaxy phones so you can put a facebrick on and be immersed in an environment. I just checked the price on Amazonand you can get a Samsung Gear VR with an Oculus controller for under $90! There’snot much you can do in the environment except look and maybe get vertigo ifyou’re inclined to that, but it is VR in the sense that you move your head andthe scene moves with you. This is becoming commonplace, but is it really theinteractive and immersive video we need? Probably not, at least other thanbeing immersed in an environment. It’s what I played with after the Samsung 360that got my head spinning and what I saw after that as well.
Samsung, along with Oculus Rift, has the product I justmentioned, packaged with a controller as Samsung Gear VR, powered by Oculus.While it’s not fully ready for prime time, it is indeed a truly interactive andimmersive environment that you can create. It’s an environment where thelearner can interact with objects and move them around. Say the training youhave needs you to bounce a virtual ball around. Yep, you can do that. Or say ithas an object you need to pick up. You can do that too. It’s fairly complex andenvironments have to be “built” for the unit, but you can use video as well.Now we’re not talking about streaming video per se, but rather video thatallows you to move through an environment. So, not strictly video in the oldsense of the term.
Chips can change the way we think about video and how we useit. Video no longer has to be a stream with a beginning and end. The video youtake can be positionally located, and the headset can track movement throughthe environment (I’ll call it a room because that word is shorter!) so thevideo is static until you move. You could never have done this with analog orearly digital video, but you can do it now.
Large scale simulations
I’ve been a fan of flight simulators for years. Flightsimulators have been a viable pilot training product since about the 1990s. Ascomputers got more capable and complex, FlightSim and all flight simulatorprograms have become more detailed and, if possible, more realistic. Somepeople have rigs with three large screens, an appropriate joy stick or yoke foractually flying their simulated aircraft and other accessories to make theirexperience more realistic. Note that this is a familiar example of dynamicinteractive video.
Then I saw the ship-piloting simulation and training at Delgado Community College in Louisiana. I wascompletely unprepared to view the simulator room at the College. It’s a room for training ship captains and pilots in shiphandling. Piloting a ship is about the last thing I think about. I’ve never givenmuch thought about how complex it is to steer a huge container ship. I’m notentirely clear about how this works, but suffice it to say that such a ship canweigh north of five million pounds. It can be about 400 meters long and ittakes about 15 minutes to stop, so it’s not quite the same as pulling a waterskier with a 14-foot speedboat! Delgado Community College has an entire curriculum for ship pilots and captains. The simulator rooms are made to look and feellike a pilot house, and these simulations make anything you might have thoughtyou’d seen before a toy.
These rooms are most assuredly not toys. They are built andprogrammed to be an advanced simulation that effectively approximates the pilot housesof vessels ranging from a towboat with barges on the intracoastal waterway, to atug, an offshore supply boat, a large container ship, a cruise ship, an oil supertanker,or other sea-going ship. The big ships are impressively difficult to operate witha large margin of safety. Great training and evaluation is a must to keep thewaters and ships, which carry a huge chunk of the world’s economy, safe aroundthe globe. These huge ships are all powered by computers (as well as honkinghuge engines) and are steered with a little knob or a track ball. Veryincongruous.
What wasn’t incongruous was the level of training and thelevel of simulation that was available in these simulation rooms. First thescreens; I counted 20, of which 10 were huge views out of the windows of the simulated pilot house. Then there werethe computers that tracked the ship’s functions as well as a computer thatcould access the internet, and another that was translating radar. Everyfunction a captain of a container ship might need is at his or her fingertips. Immersive.Dynamic. Interactive. Yes, in some ways it’s an easier sim than flying. In shippiloting there are only two dimensions to be concerned about. X and Y. No Zaxis, which would be altitude. (Unless ocean swells are altitude changes.) Are these simulations immersive?If you’re not immersed in what you’re doing here, you’re probably brain dead.Are they interactive? Do you need to ask? Are they dynamic? Ask one of thestudents. The instructors throw all sorts of problems at them.
Simulation has a place in our training as well. A shiphandling simulation can only be created if you’ve got a really big budget, butit’s scalable at a certain level, so think about what kinds of simulationsmight work for your business. Every business, outside of compliance training,is different, so some or all of this might be appropriate for you. But as allthese technologies become mainstream, they’ll eventually find a place in yourbusiness. That ship simulation could be done in a few years with a face brickand objects you react to in virtual space instead of real space. Will it be aseffective a way of training as the huge simulator room? The jury is out on thisone, and we have to sort out the plusses and minuses of virtual simulations aswe pass these computational milestones in a few years. Truly immersive dynamicinteractive video is coming your way, and sooner rather than later. Time tostart thinking about what you might be able to do in a perfect training worldwith unlimited funds and a friendly boss.
