Conditional Branching
- Catherine Hillier (Unlicensed)
For an overview of Branching, click here.
Branching is dicussed in Motive Academy in this course.
Another way to control the sequence of events in your VR experience is through conditional branching. Conditions in Storyflow allow you to control when and if a Frame starts. Sometimes, you’ll want to wait until something specific happens. Conditions allow you to do this.
Storyflow provides a library of different Conditions which can be dragged and dropped into a Frame. These Conditions can be based on Resources, learner actions, the state of a 3D model, and many more possibilities. Conditions provide an easy way to ensure that your VR scenarios are customizable for your specific needs.
Looking back at our original example, we showed the Frames authored in parallel:
By adding Conditions here, you can control when each one launches and what needs to be completed before the next Frame, regardless of position in the hierarchy.
For this next example, let’s say that the “Pick up Beaker” Frame should go first, then the “Close fume hood” Frame, and lastly, the “ Enter the break room” Frame. We can accomplish this using Conditions.
You would start by adding a Condition in the “Close fume hood” Frame that waits for the “Pick up beaker” Frame to complete:
In the Conditions section is an Object Event Condition, looking for the Grasp 100ml Beaker Resource to close before the learner can close the fume hood:
Adding this Condition simply means the “Close fume hood” Frame cannot start until the learner picks up the beaker. The same things are done in the other Frames as well.
Next, we want the “Enter the break room” Frame to not start unless the “Close fume hood” Frame is complete. It would be authored the same as the previous example. Here we select the “Enter the break room” Frame and add the Object Event Condition to look for when the “Close fume hood” Grasp Resource closes.
Authoring Note
You have probably seen this familiar pattern used in many content creation tools in these examples. If “this thing happens,” then “this next thing will happen in response.” The “if this then this” flow drive the authoring of most learning development, simulations, games, and more. Storyflow makes this process as simple or complex as you need it to be.