Edify has a number of tools aimed at helping both you and participants who access your lesson navigate through the various scenes or sections, and access the content in the way you want them to. These can be as simple as setting a number of pre-placed positions, so you can accurately manouvre around the lesson while presenting, or can enable you to break away from a normal linear presentation, and instead create branching paths that your students can explore at will.
Edify has a number of tools aimed at helping both you and participants who access your lesson navigate through the various scenes or sections, and access the content in the way you want them to. These can be as simple as setting a number of pre-placed positions, so you can accurately manouvre around the lesson while presenting, or can enable you to break away from a normal linear presentation, and instead create branching paths that your students can explore at will.
Waypoints are our method of navigating around an individual scene. For a presentation context, these are useful if you have different sections of content within your lesson with different broadcast cameras, and you want to make sure you move to the exact same location each time. If instead you are creating an Experience lesson, these are useful for creating clear sections of contents that you want your students to access, rather than relying on them to wander to the right areas by themselves.
To access waypoints, go to the Objects tab, and select the Waypoints subtab. Here, you can press the Waypoint Placement toggle, and place your waypoints the same way you can place objects. Note that the waypoints point towards you, so a good tip is to stand where you want the user to end up facing, and then place the waypoint at the place you want them to stand.
In the future, users will also be able to specify a default starting waypoint for each scene, which will decide where the user will appear within a new environment, rather than appear at the default location. This will give you more control over when and where users appear whenever they switch scene.
Portals are our navigation tool between scenes. While users can move between different scenes by selecting them in the Scenes tab, or simply by pressing next and previous scene, these generally lend themselves to linear lesson styles, or remove the users immersivity. Instead, we wanted users to be able to create non-linear lessons with decision making.
Portals achieve this as objects linked to a particular scene, other than the scene you are in. To do this, go to the Scenes tab, and press "Add Portal" on the Scene you'd like the Portal to take you to. You can then place this in the same way as objects, by pointing and clicking on the ground. When you now press on the created portal, it will take you to the connected Scene.
Take a room with various doors leading to further rooms, each of which is a separate Environment. Rather than having a user navigate by selecting one of the rooms from the Environments tab, or by selecting a scene directly, instead you would place a Portal at each of the doors. When the user wants to "walk through" that door, they select the Portal in front of the door, and appear within the 3D Environment of that room. In this way, users can navigate through a series of different environments in whatever order you have created using the Portals.