E-Learning Heroes Challenge #114 – Interactive Video: Zooming and Magnifying Images in E-Learning. The brief: This week, your challenge is to share a solution to allow learners to zoom in or magnify parts of an image, graphic, document, or video.

This was one of those challenges that I wanted to have a go at because even though Storyline has built-in zooming (which is pretty cool) to make parts of an image larger or to get a close up of a section of a scene, I wanted to try to create a way of making parts of an image larger without using the zoom feature. I had this coffee machine image that I’d used for something else and I thought I could use it again this time to explore the different parts.

I kind of flipped the challenge idea on it’s head because rather than zoom in to look more closely at the parts, why not have the parts become larger so they can be seen along with a description. Because it’s a demo, I didn’t build out the interaction completely but just made a couple of the parts clickable – the control panel and the handle where the coffee goes.

Initially I tried to build all of the interactivity on the slide (base layer) but I ended up needing to use a couple of layers. I created my first layer for the control panel and copied my image and pasted it onto the layer (when you do this, the image is pasted in exactly the same position as it is on the base layer). Then, while still on the layer, I cropped the image so that only the panel section was visible. Next I added a motion path to the cropped image to make it move away from the complete image.

I decided to use a change of state to make the cropped image appear larger, so I created a new state for the control panel:

The great thing about motion paths is that you can add triggers to make other things happen once an object reaches the end of its motion path. In this demo, the image of the panel changes to the large state, the text box description changes state (from hidden to normal) and the whole coffee machine image also changes to a washout state – I added that later – when the motion path animation completes. I repeated this process on the second layer (the coffee handle).

It was a bit of trial and error to get the large versions of the cropped images to appear in the right place but it didn’t take too long to get it right. I also added a trigger to hide each of the layers when the timeline ends. This worked ok for the purpose of the demo but I’d probably add an object for someone to click on to hide the layer if I was going to use this in a project.

Then back on the base layer, I inserted two freeform hotspots that give the user something to click on to show their respective layers:

Interesting fact: Hotspots are 53% transparent!

That’s it, an interaction that makes part of an image larger without using the built in zoom. You can try the demo yourself by clicking on the image below:

Let me know what you think and you can see all of my ELH Challenge entries on My Portfolio page.