December 6, 2016
Increase Efficiency by Tricking the Brain during Development
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December 6, 2016
Increase Efficiency by Tricking the Brain during Development
Bachelor's in Secondary Education (English); Content design/development for 10 years; Captivate since 2016.
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Hello, all.  I am submitting this Case Study under the definition with which I use the term, and that is to research a bit through lessons learned, tie certain experiences together, and present a recommendation, for those interested, to consider applying to their development/design process.  That said, here goes. 

One day, a few months back, I was watching an episode of Brain Games on NatGeo.  For those who are unaware of the show, in a nutshell, it’s a ‘sciencey’ show that focuses on how the human brain works.  This episode, called Motion Commotion (click HERE to watch the episode), had a piece devoted to optical illusions (see below)

1-optical-illusion

http://webneel.com/daily/sites/default/files/images/daily/01-2014/1-optical-illusion.jpgsee

I assure you, nothing is moving, but there APPEARS to be circular motion associated to the image because of how our brains interpret the visual information provided.  Another example from the show focused on what they referred to as Swimmers (essentially, the illusion of fish-like shapes swimming through water).  In this illusion, only the background was moving…the fish-like objects were 100% stationary…yet, it appeared as though the fish were the objects not just moving (right to left), but SWIMMING!  That is, right to left, with a bit of bobbing up and down.

After watching the episode, I really started thinking how this ‘tricking of the brain’ could be applied to my development process.  So, I decided to develop two identical slides in Captivate 9, modeling the Swimmers illusion.  Here’s what I found:

In the first,

-I randomly placed nearly 2-dozen fish-like objects on the stage.

-I then added swimming animations to each of them separately (motion path right to left and custom path up and down) – I realize I could have duplicated 1 fish and 1 animation to save time, but the goal of this resides elsewhere.

-I filled them with a solid green fill

-I filled the slide background a bluish, (watery) color.  

-The whole process took me just under 2 hours.

***************************************************

In the second, starting from scratch,

-I randomly placed the same number of fish-like objects

-BUT THIS TIME, I filled them with a vertical gradient (green and brown)

-AND THIS TIME I added a LARGE rectangle to act as the background.  I filled it, too, with a gradient, but a horizontal one instead (6 gradients spanning two blue colors…light, dark, light, dark, light, dark with equal spacing)

-I gave the BACKGROUND a simple left to right motion path, and voila!  SWIMMING FISH!

-This one took me just over 40 minutes to complete.  Reducing my time by roughly two-thirds!

Floaters Illusion

The key here, is the use of contrasting gradients that led to the illusion of motion (just as the episode said!).

While the graphics themselves are rather basic, the goal of this case study was to open your mind to consider proactively strategically tricking the minds of others while developing to aid in the learning process.  

I hope this has been helpful, and I hope you, like me, will continue to think in terms of saving time while developing content by using the power of the brain to fill in the blanks!

Thanks for your time, and stay creative!

Adam

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