Delivering Instructions for Inherently-3d Construction Multimedia Presentations

Abstract

Today’s WWW developers are faced with a myriad of format choices that range from text to still images to animations, movies and virtual reality (VR). In building presentations that incorporate one or more of these presentation formats, developers must not only choose the most effective multimedia combination of presentation styles, but also must select the tools that they will use to build their presentation. In this paper, we compare two authoring environments: Cosmo™Worlds and Flash. We created a standard presentation for the delivery of instructions for an inherently-3D construction task; we believe that a characteristic of this type of instructional presentation is that it will be enhanced by the presence of user-controlled 3D models. We compared both the efficacy of the two authoring environments and the effectiveness of the resulting presentations. We conclude that Flash was the more complete development environment for our presentation task. Both resulting presentations (VR and Flash) were equally effective.