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Daden Limited has just released the results of their Immersive Training Authoring Tools survey, trying to figure out who is using immersive environments for training purposes and how they’re doing it.  Not surprisingly, Education was the biggest sector but the tools they use were a bit surprising.

Nearly 47% of the respondents were from education, 15% from the health professional training sector and interestingly 19% were from the corporate sector – especially as there’s little sign of a significant uptake of immersive training in that area. Second Life, OpenSim and Unity were the top three platforms and Second Life, despite the removal of the educational discount, dominates still with 39% respondents using it.

Not all that surprised to see Second Life at the top, given it’s existing infrastructure and multiuser environment.  I was surprised, however, to see Unity in there.  Unity is a great tool (I’ve even started using it myself just for experience), but not one I would typically think of for immersive environments.

via Daden release results of its Authoring Tools for Immersive Training survey.

Science daden, education, secondlife, unity

Daden Limited has a new creation online in Second Life, a virtual interactive model of the Library of Birmingham.  Using architects images and plans, Daden constructed the library on Centenary Square in second life, and included a warehouse of furniture, objects, and special features to make the environment interactive and interesting.  In addition, they trained the Library team to modify and update the space themselves.

“We felt it was important to allow the team to own the building and to be able to make the changes to the floor space and experiment with the internal fit-out rather than be reliant on Daden – and it’s worked well,” says Daden’s Managing Director David Burden. ”Every time we visit the library we notice they have made changes or added more detail.”

In addition to working as a PR piece, visitor’s time in the virtual structure is carefully recorded to be used as reference data in future modifications to the design.

Daden have also built-in sensors providing useful data to the Library team as to the routes people take and where visitors decide to explore within the Virtual Library of Birmingham. By creating a virtual model and letting users explore it we can start to get answers to the very practical questions of how a building will be used, which appear to be missed by more current techniques.

Get the full details in the Press Release after the break.

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Science daden, second life, virtual worlds

Daden has a blog post up detailing some of their work with Second-Life derived OpenSim and visualizing unstructured datasets within the world. They have some great tools for visualization on surface plots, scatter plots, and more.

Based on over 5000 tweets captured at 5 minute intervals over the day. Central cone layer shows most prolific tweeters (size = number of tweets, red = quoting others, yellow=being quoted). Position in layer reflects sentiment, high=good, low=bad (orange surface level = neutral). Lower cone layer is other Twitter users being mentioned in tweets, upper cube layer is hashtags being used, for both size=number of mentions. Each object has a label identifying name. Hovering cursor over an object brings up more information/options such as bringing up the twitter page of the user (in this case imPrinceHarry – who luckily rated positive on sentiment!). Further refinement could show social graph data from people mentioning other people in tweets, and links to hashtags they used etc.

It’s interesting to see some of the old research used for CAVE’s and Immersive Environments come back in the Virtual World space.  Not all the same rules apply, but it’s a completely different world looking at data from the Inside Out, rather than the Outside In.

via Adventures in #opensim data visualisation & visual analytics #4 – Daden Blog.

Science daden, interactive, opensim

Daden has thrown another interesting tool into the virtual world space with their “World Finder” application.  A nice web-app that allows you to select a combination of aspects you find important (security, configurability, public/private access, etc) and then let it recommend some options.

Which brings us to the ratings allocated to each world characteristics. These aren’t scientific. These are our personal view, BUT reflecting over 10 years of virtual world expertise and the delivery of over 100 virtual world projects to paying commercial clients. We’ve deliberately limited the parameters to 12 (we couldn’t manage 10 and could easily have had 50), but have tried to chose those which we think are the most critical in virtual world selection and which force users down one route or another (eg graphic quality varies only by degrees but in-world building is binary). More than happy to debate if we’ve chosen the right 12 (but only if you say which you’d drop), but we WON’T enter into debate about the ratings, they are just our view.

via World Finder – Daden Limited.

Science daden, virtual worlds

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The University of Central Florida has worked with Daden Limited to build accountancy orientation exercises in Second Life using PIVOTE.  The exercises let students access course material and trainign videos while actually doing their work in-world.

Andrew Jinman, Daden’s PIVOTE Product Manager said “This project was a great example of “Learning by Doing” – Taking the students through a step-by-step of how to use bespoke course content, grounding it within the context of course material to reinforce the knowledge learnt. It was wonderful to observe such enthusiasm by the students and immediate results.”

Results so far have been great: 47% fewer forum discussions for assistance, and 12% more project submissions.  Get the full details after the break.

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Science daden, education, second life

Daden Limited is no stranger to virtual worlds, having already created several products and won a few awards for their work in existing systems.  In a new whitepaper entitled “The Future of Virtual Worlds” they look 20 to 30 years out and what they think is coming, and I have to admit it’s an impressive bit of work.  In particular, I like the graph above showing how the space has exploding into little submarkets that they believe will re-coalesce into something useful in the near future.

Over the next two decades the boundaries between these will become blurred, and related systems such as messaging, entertainment, on-line games and even the web and desktop will be drawn into the maelstrom. The eventual model may be one where the “systems” will largely coalesce around a new 2 x 2 matrix defined by private and public access, and information and experience spaces – not by technology or even applications – although the Information axis is likely to be dominated by “web” like systems, and the Experience axis by virtual world like systems.

I also love that they very clearly and early make the definitive statement that Virtual Worlds ARE NOT the 3D Web.

One thing that we are quite clear on is that Virtual Worlds ARE NOT the 3D Web, and the future of the Web is not Virtual Worlds. A web page full of text and graphical imagery is an incredibly information rich environment. The Web will remain, for the short to medium, and maybe all but very long term, the most efficient way to view, assess and interact with most transactional information and services. Virtual worlds are about immersion and community. The two are quite fundamentally different. Virtual Worlds convey experience, the Web conveys information.

The entire paper is only 19 pages long, but it’s a good piece.  They cover the background of the technology, and how the movement into “serious games” and “Games as simulations” are the first steps toward Virtual Worlds.  They also cover some of the current problems like file formats, geometry formats, and some of the infrastructure that will have to be built to make this a reality.

You can go download it (fill out the form at the top of the page) here.

Science daden, virtual worlds, whitepaper

Daden Limited is creating an interactive map, both on the web and in Second Life, of virtual world based scientific research and educational activities in the UK as part of the upcoming British Science Festival at Aston University.

Daden Managing Director, David Burden, said; “We know that there is a lot of UK science and Higher Education activity within virtual worlds but is hard to visualise the scale and scope of activity without seeing it on a map. We hope that this map will inform people about projects they didn’t know about – and encourage them to visit. We want it to become a lasting resource for UK Science which can live on beyond this year’s British Science Festival.”

So fire up your SL viewer and go check it out, or go to their website and see it there.

Full release after the break.

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Science conference, daden, second life, virtual worlds

The Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge has wrapped up, and among the finalists the winners have been chosen: UK-based Daden Limited and their PIVOTE and Datascape systems took home the gold in Skills Building and Collaboration categories.

Tami Griffith, creator of the challenge, adds “Daden’s submissions exemplify what we were hoping to see in the challenge. Datascape’s demonstration of streaming real-time data will be very useful for the analysis community while PIVOTE goes a long way in demonstrating interactive capabilities that could be used by first-responders. We are delighted that they were in our winners circle and we expect to see a great relationship form between the U.S. Government and Daden.“

Both of Daden’s entries are based on Second Life and run within the world, are available for public view in Second Life® at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Daden%20Cays/126/217/22 and http://slurl.com/secondlife/Daden%20Prime/223/224/21

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Science daden, federal, fvwc, second life, virtual worlds

Daden Limited has worked in data acquisition and visualization technologies for several years, but yesterday announced a new tool called “DataScape”, a virtual environment for managing multiple streams of incoming data simultaneously.  Built on top of Second Life, it’s a 3D environment that allows users to manipulate maps, geographic data, CCTV and webcam feeds, RSS and Twitter feeds, and various other remote sensing technologies within a single virtual world.

“We are particularly keen to see how such spaces can provide collaborative responsive planning centers for natural disasters and humanitarian emergencies allow representatives from NGOs Governments and communities around the world to meet and plan in virtual space in a way that was previously only available to the military and intelligence agencies.” While Datascape is currently only compliant with the Second Life platform Burden told Virtual Worlds News he “may look at ActiveWorlds next.”

A video showing an older version of the DataScape product for Aircraft tracking can be seen after the break.
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Hardware, Science daden, secondlife, virtual worlds