VIRTUAL LIBRARY OF BIRMINGHAM The £188.8m Library of Birmingham will be a major new cultural destination, rewriting the book for 21st century public libraries. It opens in 2013. During the design stage Birmingham City Council contracted Daden to deliver an interactive virtual model of the new library, primarily to support community engagement, to inform the internal fit-out and to investigate the potential of a mixed physical/ virtual library space. Daden used the architect's images, plans, drawings to build the Virtual Library of Birmingham in Second Life.
US FEDERAL VIRTUAL WORLDS CHALLENGE 2011 Daden Project wins for 2nd Year One of our projects scooped Second Prize in the AI Assisted Training category of the US Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge 2011. The 2nd place for Hurricane Shelter Simulation went to Andrew Boyarsky of City of New York School of Professional Studies. Daden used PIVOTE to create the vLearning exercises (approx. 3-4.5hrs long) used within the simulation. Videos: noaagames.org a video of the project An Adventure in Emergency Preparedness Training highlights why the client chose to create the exercise in a virtual environment
The Virtual Library of Birmingham is proving to be a valuable tool for library staff working on the new development and it is anticipated that it will launch on Second Life in summer 2011, allowing citizens to explore the new library in the virtual world. The Library: •
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Enables staff and the public to visualise and explore the new library and become familiar with its inside spaces - virtual worlds offer the chance to explore the social dimension of the space. Enables library staff to better understand how people might use and move around the building, and make informed decisions with regards to floor layouts etc. Allows the public to visit the Library of Birmingham in the virtual world long before the building opens. Allows virtual world visitors to explore the new building at their own pace, in their own way, as they would the real library. Every movement, action and comment of the user can be tracked and stored - yielding valuable data for library staff to understand how the space is used.
Visitors to the Virtual Library will be able to share their thoughts/comments and leave "like this" style post-it notes using Daden's Annotated Spaces. Development of the Virtual Library of Birmingham is fully funded by the West Midlands Regional Improvement and Efficiency Programme (RIEP). Read the Library of Birmingham's The Word - chapter 4
THE UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA Virtual Training for Accountancy Tools The University of Central Florida (UCF), commissioned Daden Limited to develop several accountancy orientation exercises in Second Life on the university's campus known as “ReallyEngagingAccounting”. Dr Hornik, an early adopter of virtual worlds for education has been using Second Life to assist in the delivery of coursework utilising a 3D accountancy equation and an interactive T-account learning tool. Students were set exercises in-world and submitted their homework through the dropbox system available on the campus. To read the whole press release
BUILDING SOCIAL MODELS One thing we've found challenging over the last few months is to get people in the architecture/ building sector to understand how what we do with built environment visualisations (e.g. with the Library project) is different to what they do. For architects in particular it appears to be all about "look" - the closer a computer visualisation is to perfection (not reality) the better it is regardless of the usability of the building. In our recent white paper we presented the "whole life" model of a building that can be supported by virtual worlds - where the "social" dimension of the build is paramount. This has now led us to start think that maybe the right message to get across is that there are 3 "models" that anyone involved in the built environment should be concerned with: • • •
the architects visual appearance model – what will it look like the engineer/builders structural model – how do we build it the social model – how do we use it
At present there is a lot of debate about Building Information Modelling (BIM) - the overlap between architects and engineers, but the Building Social Model (that which virtual worlds are ideally suited for) is getting overlooked. In the future then (10yrs+?) hopefully one platform will cover all three uses, but at the moment we need to find ways in which projects can explore all three dimensions, probably across 2-3 tools, but in the most cost-effective manner.
VISUAL ANALYTICS As regular readers will know we've always been interested in using virtual worlds to display and analyse data right from the LAX air traffic display we did back in 2007. We are finding this area (which apparently is called visual analytics) proving to be of more and more interest to those with large data sets to analyse. Currently we are:
completing a research project for the MOD on immersive 3D visual analytics
creating a demonstrator for a major defence contractor awaiting the results of our bid for an SBRI call sponsored by INSTICT – the Home Office Innovative Science in Technology in Counter-Terrism programme. We are doing all of this work in OpenSim, where we can have entire sims just full of data. To support this we have created a generic plotter interface into OpenSim which loads an Excel spreadsheet (or other data source) and then plots the data as an immersive space. Plot options include "standard" pointand-line plots (and you won't believe how hard it was to plot lines in OpenSim at first!), bar charts and even social graphs - all in 3D. There are some images of the work and an example data set of every star within 20 parsecs on the Sun on our blog (and remember this OAR file is for sale!). Once we have the MOD work out of the way, we'd like to starting using the tools against DNA sequencing information and other commercial data sources. There are two main reasons why we think immersive 3D is good for data visualisation: First the brain is naturally designed to analyse and understand 3D scenes even when viewed through the PC screen (an egocentric not allocentric view apparently), and in the virtual world your avatar and the surroundings give you a consistent frame of reference which is lacking in 3D datacube type visualisations.
Vote for Daden's MD David Burden for the Virtual Excellence AWARDS 2011 at http://awards.associationofvirtualworlds.com/david-burden/
Second because the virtual world is also a collaboration space you can have meetings about the data in the data, this not only helps the communication process but also aids memory - since you remember that person X was stood by point Y whilst they were making important point Z rather than just pointing to yet another Powerpoint.
OPENSIM In the last few months we've found ourselves using OpenSim (the open source version of Second Life) more and more, both for internal and client projects. The big advantages are that we are in complete control, we can run it behind firewalls, we can build over multiple sims without crippling costs, and we can save and load complete builds as single files - great for content distribution and updating. And since it will run standalone on a PC you can even work on sim's whilst on the train! The latest version (0.7.1) even includes shared media and mesh support. There is though still the odd bug or missing feature in comparison to Second Life. At Daden we now have our own internal "Daden World", a grid supporting dozen or so sims. In the next couple of months we'll provide access to some of those to the public either through a HyperGrid like OSGrid or a cloud-hosting service such as Kitely. We are also seriously looking at whether there is a commercial/ educational market now for complete sim builds. If we made something like our Apollo 11 simulation or stellar visualisation, or maybe a specific vocational or key stage training unit available as an OAR file for a reasonable price would you be interested - let us know (and let us know what you think a reasonable price might be!)
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DADEN WHITE PAPERS Daden has released a new white paper on the virtual worlds and the built environment and is now available to download on our website along with four others: Virtual Worlds and the Built Environment.
VIRTUAL REFUGEE CAMP DADEN NEWS To read the following in our archives, please click on the links: Daden's News Press Releases In preparation for a UK Trade Mission to the United Nations in March 2011 in Geneva we created a virtual refugee camp in OpenSim. The aim of the build was just to help the UN staff we were talking to (e.g. from UNHCR) to "place" our work within the context of their own operations. We based the camp model on photographs of various UNHCR camps, and Guy, our Lead Builder, spent some time building nice sculptie copies of the sort of tents the UN uses, from ex-Army "12 x 12s" to white and blue UN tents. Within the build we then embedded an example of a typical training exercise, using a chatbot to answer basic questions about the camp, and question-mark task icons to indicate PIVOTE driven quests/tasks that the learner can complete.
DADEN COVERAGE To read the following in our archives, please click on the links: Online Media Coverage
The model was well received (both in Geneva and by interested parties in the UK), and when combined with a video of the NYC emergency management simulation gave people a good idea of what an immersive training environment can provide. If you are interested in using virtual worlds for disaster or emergency management training then please get in touch. To see more images please visit our blog.
INVITATION Daden Summer Party It's been a year since we moved into offices at Birmingham Science Park Aston.
WORLD FINDER APP A simple “virtual world finder” tool has been created by virtual world specialist's Daden Limited to help businesses and organisations choose between competing platforms for their virtual world projects. World Finder is based around 12 key virtual world features which have been chosen as they highlight the biggest differences between available virtual world platforms. The rating of each world against these features are based on Daden's extensive experience of nearly a hundred virtual world projects over the past 5 years.
To celebrate the milestone and the beginning of Summer, we would like to invite you to a drinks and canapés reception at our office.
David Burden, Daden's MD said, “Although we've seen some platforms fall by the wayside those that remain are getting steadily more powerful, so it's actually harder to make the right choice. World Finder was designed to capture our feelings as to the relative strengths of each platform and to make it easier to show clients the pros and cons of each in any given situation. Having created the tool as an app it seemed sensible to share it with the wider community.”
Date: Time: Location:
The 12 features assessed by the tool are:
Telephone:
25th May 2011 4:30pm – 7:30pm Faraday Wharf, Birmingham Science Park Aston, Holt Street, Birmingham, B7 4BB 0121 250 5678
RSVP:
On EventBrite
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Whether users can build and customise in-world Quality of graphics Size of area modelled Ability to customise the client Whether the user is represented by an avatar Whether its for solo or group use Whether it runs in a browser, mobile or just as a PC application Whether it can be deployed on servers behind a firewall The robustness and security of the code Whether you can import existing 3D model Whether the vendor is stable, and the user community well developed and of course cost!
David continues “We were keen to make sure the criteria were an even balance of user, technical and commercial features. All too often the debate about virtual worlds is solely about technical issues like visual quality and bandwidth”. The initial version of World Finder focusses on the 4 platforms supported by Daden in its work with clients: Second Life, OpenSim, Vastpark and Unity. Later versions of World Finder may be extended to include other virtual worlds and game engines. Click here to try out World Finder
Please click here to view directions on how to find us and for a MAP. We hope the party will give you an opportunity to catch up with the Daden Team and everything we've been up to. If you have any questions, regarding the event or how Daden could help you and your business, please do not hesitate to contact us on 0121 250 5678 or email lucy.smallwood-rose@daden.co.uk.
COMMENTS If you have any comments and questions or if there is a particular project that you are working on, or thinking off, where virtual worlds or virtual characters could help, please contact us.
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