Video games are a great source for finding techniques that can be applied to really immerse your audience in the demonstration you are building. I learned a really great lesson once about 'perceived reality' and wanted to share...

The space battle scene depicted above illustrates a principle I like to apply to the work I do for my clients. Hopefully, you're watching this video with your computer speakers turned on; if you are, you'll hear explosions and space ships screaming past amongst other sound effects.

A number of years ago, I took a video game programming course and the instructor asked our class an interesting question: "Is there sound in space?"

If you think about it, the answer is obviously no. Sound requires air, and there is no air in space, so obviously there is no sound in space. NASA gives a more complete answer:

"Sound is also a type of wave that we cannot see. Like ocean waves,
sound waves need a medium to travel through. Sound can travel through
air because air is made of molecules. These molecules carry the sound
waves by bumping into each other, like dominoes knocking each other
over. Sound can travel through anything made of molecules - even
water! There is no sound in space because there are no molecules there
to transmit the sound waves. "

Then the follow-up question from our instructor (who happened to specialize in sound) was, "If there is no sound in space, then why do space-based video games like StarCraft invest so much in sound?"

The answer is that we expect it. When we see something explode, we expect to hear something. When we see a space ship fly by, we expect to hear something. If those expectations are not met, then we don't feel the experience was realistic.

Satisfying expected realism is something veteran video game developers know they have to do in order to produce something their customers will enjoy.

The same concept applies to building technical demonstrations; in order to captivate our audience, we have to satisfy their sense of expected realism.

This doesn't mean we fake everything in a demonstration; but it does mean that sometimes things have to be tweaked.

Performance is something I really like to tune for a demonstration.

Dialogs that take a long time to open, web sites that take a long time to appear are all good candidates for optimization. Sometimes this optimization is just a matter of warming the system up. But, at WonderAffect, we have done things as drastic as develop completely artificial facades of real applications to lend a sense of speed to their performance. There is no better way to lose an audience's attention than to make them wait. I've found it is far better to tweak/fake/adjust mundane aspects of your demonstration in order to speed up getting to good part—the part where your product/service really adds value.

Recognizing and satisfying expected realism was a really interesting lesson for me years ago in that video game development course, and now it is something I find really helps me produce great products for my clients.