You’ve heard of ‘Death by PowerPoint’, well ‘Death by Prezi’ seems to be around the corner with ‘Death by Motion Sickness’. From searching the Internet for ‘Prezi’ and ‘motion sickness’ I found Tom Walton’s blog post from a year ago (Prezi for presentations, 22 January 2011), where he states:
We have “Death by PowerPoint”; “Death by motion sickness in Prezi” is an equally likely scenario.
This has not been an issue for me previously, but I have recently had a comment from someone about this effect of Prezi, which has actually caused them nausea for up to one hour after using the tool. We have set a plan in action in case this occurs with any of the students who are collaborating with us on ‘Create Curate Collaborate!‘, and we will be able to offer alternatives if the need arises.
Doing a bit more research into Prezi and motion sickness throws up the following recommendations:
- Prezi.com recommends using grouping and layering to reduce panning
- thewikiman recommends: tip #4 Position your materials sympathetically to avoid motion-sickness.
Although this makes a slight improvement, to be honest the Prezi motion is starting to irritate me, even when moving very slightly in a straight path from one identically sized object to another. These tips have also not solved the problem for my colleague at all.
springerspandrel from within the Prezi Community website has written a really good post about one month ago, about what needs to be done to solve the ‘bounce’ issue: Path trajectory (and zoom) options to reduce bounce and sea-sickness and I quote:
”pogo-stick” feel of the path animations
and
In general, the little “zippy bounce” effect along every bit of path (even between same-size nodes) is a bit too cutesy for me sometimes.
Sorry Prezi, but I have to agree. The great thing about Prezi is that they are constantly changing and evolving and respond to user requests much faster than any other presentation software programmes that I am aware of – so watch this space!
