This software is freely distributable. You may install the software on as many machines as you like. You may make copies of the program and pass it to others. The only restriction is that you may not make financial gain from the distribution of the software and you must pass a copy (either electronic or paper) of the first page of this manual.
This software is supplied 'as is'. Its developers provide no warranty, whether express or implied, of the merchantability of the software or its fitness for any particular purpose. In no circumstances will the developers be liable for any damage, loss of profits, good-will or for any indirect or consequential loss arising out of your use of the software, or inability to use the software, even if the developers have been advised of the possibility of such loss.
This software has been developed so that it can be used with a wide variety of clients. If you have any suggestions for extending the functionality of the software, or for making it easier to use, please contact us at the address given below. If you find any bugs, please pass the details on to us.
This software is supplied free of charge and support is limited to the best
efforts of its developers. If you have problems you should contact:
E-mail: webbie@co.umist.ac.uk
PC compatible with Windows 98, Me, 2000 and XP.
This document is the user manual for Sense Factory, a framework for creating switch activated activities.
Sense Factory is a software application that allows switch-based activities to be developed and presented to a switch user. A simple way of thinking about Sense Factory is to think of it as a carousel-type slide projector. When using a slide projector, the user presses a button and a slide is projected; at the next press of the button, the next slide in the sequence is shown.
Sense Factory works in the same way. Except instead of photographic images being projected onto a screen, Sense Factory presents its slides on a computer screen. Sense Factory slides can be photographic images (captured with a digital camera), but they can also be computer-produced pictures (for example clip art) or even video clips. In addition sounds and text can be added to the slides.
Sense Factory can be downloaded from here. Click here to download Sense Factory.
The setup program will provide a set of on-screen instructions, please follow these.
A set of activities are available from this website. These are downloaded and installed in a similar way to the Sense Factory application. Where?
In this section we introduce some of the terminology used in this manual.
After installing Sense Factory you can run it by clicking the Start button, then Programs, then Sense, then Sense Factory.
Sense Factory will now run and you should a screen similar to that shown in Figure 1.
Discounting the top of the screen for a moment, the screen is divided into three major parts.
You can run an activity now by clicking on your choice. You can step through the slides of the activity by pressing a switch, the keyboard's Space bar or the left mouse button (for the full set of control options see below). To close the activity and return to the starting screen, press the 'Esc' key.
To exit Sense Factory, click on the icon marked with an 'x' in the top right hand corner of the screen. You should note that when Sense Factory starts it changes your screen to 640 x 480 resolution and fills the screen completely. When Sense Factory exits, it changes the screen resolution back to its original setting.
There are three basic operations:
In this section we explain how activities can be created and edited.
To create or modify an activity, press the Function Key F7 when Sense Factory is running. This will bring up the form shown in Figure 2.
This gives three options:
The editing and creation of activities is the same independent of what route is chosen and we describe this process below. Before we do so, we need to explain what the system requires for each of the three options.
When you select next, you will be asked firstly an activity name - see Figure 3.
After you have created the activity (see Section 6.2). You will need to save the activity; this will then prompt you to decide which topic the activity should be saved in. There are options to use an existing topic or to create a new one. This process is explained in Section 6.2.8.
You will be asked to choose which activity you wish to edit from the form shown in Figure 4. You simply click on the activity that you wish to edit and select the next button. Remember that any changes you made will cause the activity to be permanently changed.
You will firstly be asked to select the existing activity on which you wish to base the new activity. This is presented by the same form as that used for editing an existing activity (Figure 4). You will then be asked for the name of the new activity. This uses the same form as that shown in Figure 3.
Irrespective of what option you selected above, you will reach the screen shown in Figure 5. The only difference is that if you are creating a new activity from scratch, the main part of the window will be blank.
The form is divided into two major parts. On the right we have the set of slides on the left we have general settings for the activity and tools to record sound and create blank slides. We will deal with the slide editing part first and consider the left hand side of the screen later.
Sense Factory supports a number of picture formats - please see the Section 9.1.1 for further details.
The main part of the form is taken up with the slides that make up the Sense Factory activity. There are a number of things that you might need to do with pictures, these are described below.
Create a new picture slide - Select a picture file on your computer (for example, by using Windows Explorer) and drag and drop it into the right hand side of the screen. To select and drag and drop it, use the left mouse button; keep the left mouse button down. Move the mouse pointer to the desired point and then release it.The slides are presented in the order in which they appear in the activity (left to right, top to bottom) so you can try and place the picture in the order that it will appear in the activity. The place at which the picture will be inserted is shown by a vertical bar. However, if goes in the wrong place, don't worry you can move it later - see below. You should note that the file will be copied into one of Sense Factory's folders. This means that if the original file is deleted or moved, your Sense Factory activity will still work. You should take care that you don't replace an existing slide with the new slide (see Replacing a Picture Slide below)
Delete a picture slide - Right click on the frame you wish to delete. This will bring up the small menu shown in Figure 6 - select the Delete Step option.
Move a picture slide - Simply select the slide and drag and drop it into the correct place. The new position is indicated by a vertical bar.
Replacing a picture slide - a picture slide can be overwritten by a new picture by dropping the new picture file on top of the existing slide. You can tell when the slide is selected for replacement because a light circle appears at its centre.
Create a blank slide - you may want to have a slide that has no picture (it may be a slide that only has sound and/or text or is simply a blank slide to break up the slide show). To create a blank slide, simply drag and drop the blank slide icon into the appropriate position in the slide show (as if you were creating a new slide). The blank slide icon can be found at the bottom left of the main form - it is shown in close up in Figure 7. The colour of the blank slide is controlled by its background colour. See Section 6.2.5
Finding out the name of the picture file - this can be done by hovering the mouse pointer over the slide. Hovering is achieved by placing the mouse pointer on top of an object and waiting a few seconds. The full path and file name of the picture will then be given.
Sense Factory supports a number of video formats - please see Section 9.1.2 for further details.
Video-based slides are managed in the same way as picture files. The only difference is that rather than show a picture on the slide editing part of the screen, you see a slide called 'video file'; in Figure 8 below there are two video frames. This can make it difficult to tell which slide is which. However, by hovering the mouse pointer over the slide the file name and location of the file is given (as described for picture-based slides above).
Sense Factory supports a number of sound formats - please see the Section 9.1.3.
Once a picture or video slide is inserted it can have a sound associated with it. You may be working with pre-recorded sounds that exist as files on your computer or other media or may be recording sounds as you go. Both are explained below:
Sound files can be added to video clips. If the video clip has sound associated with it, the video clip's sound will be played at the same time as the sound file. This usually means that the sound file can be clearly heard and the video clip sound is lost.
Text can be associated with any slide.
Text can be added to a slide by selecting the slide with the right button, moving to the Text option of the window that appears and selecting the Edit Text option (for menu see Figure 12).
This brings up a new form, which is shown in Figure 13.
The text to appear on the slide is written into the text box at the top. The position of the text is controlled by the three radio buttons at the bottom of the form. If the slide has a picture and text is placed at either the top or the bottom of the screen, the picture will shrink somewhat and the text will appear either above or below the picture on the slide's background colour (for setting background colour see later). If the text is placed in the middle of the slide, the text will appear in front of the picture.
The font of the text can be changed by selecting the Font button. This brings up the form shown in Figure 14, which allows the font, its style and its size to be changed.
The colour of the text can also be changed by selecting the Colour button. This brings up a further form from which text colours can be selected. Colour selection is quite important, if you've entered text and it can't be seen this will be because the text colour is the same as the background on which it is positioned.
It is quite likely that you will want to make the text associated with all of the slides the same font and colour. This can be done by selecting the second option from the text menu shown in Figure 15. This will set the text font, size, style and colour for all slides to match that of the selected slide.
In order to minimise the time associated with creating text it is suggested that you follow the procedure given below:
Finally, when a slide has text associated with it, a 'Text' icon appears in the bottom left corner of the slide (see Figure 16)
The background colour for a slide can be set. This is useful when text is used with pictures at the top and bottom of the slide and when the slide has no picture or video clip. The background colour for a slide can be selected by firstly right clicking on the slide to bring up the menu below and selecting the background option to produce the menu shown in Figure 17.
Select the Select Background option. This brings up a menu that allows you to set the background colour of the slide.
In the same way as the text characteristics of all slides can be set to match the text characteristics of a selected slide, the background colour for all slides can be set to the same colour. This can be achieved by using the 'Set all step's background colour same as this option'. When this is selected, all slides have the same background colour - the one that matches the currently selected slide. To set different a background colour for the individual slides use the Select Background option for each of the slides individually.
These are set using the top left hand part of the activity creation form. These apply globally to all activities. The part of the form referred to is shown in Figure 18.
Sense Factory has a built in sound recorder that allow sound files to be created and associated with slides. The relevant part of the form is shown in Figure 19.
When the sound has been recorded, it is represented by the icon at the bottom of the frame. This can then be dragged onto a slide - for further details see Section 6.2.3. The recorder is controlled by three buttons. Not all of these are available for selection at any given time, and when they are disabled they have a red 'stop sign' superimposed. The buttons from right to left are:
The sound recorder uses the current microphone volume settings of your computer.
Sounds are recorded at a relatively modest level of quality (11KHz, 8-bit mono). This gives acceptable quality with small file sizes. If you wish to record at higher quality, you should do so using an external application (for example, Windows Sound Recorder) and chose the quality level yourself. Sound files recorded in this way can be dragged onto slides using the method described earlier.
When you have finished editing an activity, you need to select the Save Activity button at the bottom of the form (if you wish to exit without your changes being recorded you should select the Cancel Activity option).
If you are editing an existing activity, the activity will be saved. If you were creating a new activity or modifying an existing activity, you will be asked to specify the topic that it should be saved in. This is accomplished using the form shown in Figure 19.
To create the activity in an existing topic, simply select the topic name and press okay. To create a new topic, select the Create New button. This will ask you to provide a topic name. You will also need to specify which image you want to appear on main screen to represent the topic. If no image is selected, the name of the topic will appear instead. To do this drag a bitmap file onto the picture box towards the bottom right of the screen (in Figure 20 has the symbol GO! in it).
Activities and Topics are deleted by using the file management capabilities of the Windows operating system (for example, by using Windows Explorer).
The topics and activities are stored in the same folder as the program was installed. If you accepted the default for installation this will be c:\Sense\Sense Factory. In that folder you will find a folder called Topics. This folder holds the details of all topics and activities. If you move into the topics folder, you will find a set of folders, one for each topic on your machine (the names of the folders match the names of the topics)
To delete a topic simply delete the folder with that name.
To delete an activity, move into the topic folder that contains that activity. The topic folder holds a set of folders, one for each activity. Simply delete the folder which has the name of the folder that you wish to delete.
For further information on Sense Factory's file structure see the Section 9.
The previous section discussed the options that apply to individual activities. The General Settings apply to all activities and can be changed independent of the activities.
The General Settings cover three areas:
The General Settings menu is invoked from the keyboard by Function Key F8.
The first 'tab' on the General Settings menu (shown in Figure 21) allows you to specify which serial port your switches are connected to. Sense Factory checks for unused serial ports, so if a serial port is used for some other purpose it appears with a line through it. In Figure 21, only Serial Ports 2 and 3 are available for connection.
If you are connecting your switches in some other way (for example by USB or through some specialist keyboard) you will need to map your switch input onto the keyboard commands, Space for Switch 1, and Enter for Switch 2.
In Slide Show mode the slides are presented in sequence without intervention from the user. The duration of the presentation of the slides is controlled by the Slide Show 'tab'. The form is shown in Figure 22. Clicking the More and Less buttons will alter the time - the time range is 1 to 30 seconds.
Some users will not wait for the sound associated with the slide to finish playing before moving to the next slide. Sense Factory will prevent the slide being changed until the sound has finished playing. This is achieved by selecting the option in the Switch Bangers 'tab' - see Figure 23.
When you need to move an activity from one machine to another, follow the procedure below.
| 1) | You firstly need to find where Sense Factory is installed. If you followed
the default installation this will be c:\Sense\Sense Factory. |
| 2) | You then need to locate a folder called Topics - this folder contains
all the topics, activities and associated files. |
| 3) | You then need find the topic folder which matches the name of topic that
contains the activity you wish to copy. |
| 4) | Enter the topic folder. This will have a set of folders that have the
same names as the activities in the topic. Select the folder whose name
matches that of the activity that you want to copy. |
| 5) | On the new machine find the topic folder you wish the activity to reside
in. (Follow steps 1 to 3). Note that the topic on the new machine does not
have to match that on the original machine. |
| 6) | Copy the activity folder into the selected topic folder on the new machine. If you are copying using floppy disk you will probably find that the whole activity will not fit on one disk. If it doesn't, simply copy the files across a set at a time - taking care to copy all the files. |
The file structure for Sense Factory is as follows.
| a) | The Topics folder under the program installation (c:\Sense\Sense Factory2
by default) is the root folder for Sense Factory it contains a set of topics.
The name of the topic folder matches that presented in Sense Factory. |
| b) | Each topic folder contains a set of folders and a bitmap file (.bmp).
Each folder contains an activity and has the same name as the activity.
The bitmap file holds the image that is presented on the Sense Factory screen
to indicate the topic. |
| c) | Each activity folder consists of a folder and a file (.sbs). The Media folder holds the sound and images that are used in the activity. The .sbs file is the script that is used by Sense Factory 2 in order to present the slide show. |
These files and folders must be present for Sense Factory to work properly.
Sense Factory supports a number of file formats.
Pictures are always resized to fit the screen (604 x 480 pixels) except for animated GIFs, which are not resized. You should note that if your original image was small (especially if it was a JPEG or Bitmap) the quality of the image may be poor.
Bitmaps (.bmp) files
The files that can be supported depend on the media player codecs installed on your computer system. You will almost certainly be able play the two listed below (but may not on older machines), you may be able to play other video file formats depending on your system configuration.
These can be downloaded from here. Click here to download.
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