The Lucid Player comprises a main window presenting to the user four lists:
Features Available – lists all features and their states that may be used to describe the specimen to be identified
Features Chosen – displays features that have been chosen
Entities Remaining – lists all entities in the key that still remain as possible identifications of the specimen being investigated, given the features that have been chosen
Entities Discarded – lists all entities in the key that have been excluded as a result of the chosen features
When the key is first started, Features Chosen and Entities Discarded are empty. A user chooses states of features by ticking their check-boxes. In response, the Player progressively removes from Entities Remaining those entities that do not match the chosen states.
By choosing more and more features, the list in Entities Remaining will be gradually reduced until, perhaps, a single entity remains – the specimen has been identified.
In addition to the basic lists of features and entities, a well-designed Lucid key also provides help to users through pictures and web pages illustrating and explaining features and their states, pages with extra information on the entities in the key, feature and entity subsets and dependencies to help organise and streamline the lists.
Please see the Lucid Player Help for more information.