Category Archives: Games

Mar 05

Serious fun in Coventry, part the second

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This is one of a serious of posts about the Culture, Heritage & Tourism Technology Workshop at the Serious Games Institute on Tues, 4 March.

After coffee Ron Edwards (Ambient Performance) kicked things off talking about mobile & location based goodness. His ambition was to ‘Be where the eyeballs are’. The most recent project was Creative Encounter – in partnership with Black Ridge Games. Ron also talked about a game, Dockers dilemma (a mix of Flashlite and mscapes). Although the game was focused on the mobile device and potentially very individualistic, it turned out that game play was very collaborative. Ron also demo’d a streaming technology from his N95 that looked a bit Qik’ish.

David Buden (Daden Ltd) did some Second Life flythroughs, after the obligatory graphics glitches. A very cool mash up was a live feed of LAX flight data (delayed by a minute so you couldn’t use it for missile targeting) and displayed in 3D so you walk through the flight paths and see the busiest routes. A slightly more ‘fun’ data visualisation project was the Twitter fountain. This polled the
Twitter public stream and posted twit’s as small bubbles that slowly floated up in the air and disappeared into the sky. Quite relaxing to watch. I wasn’t on wifi at the time so wasn’t twittering myself (though I did get this sorted after lunch).
He then teamed up with Martyn again to show off a 3D audio VR-RL mash-up that moved the sound of his avatar walking around SL around the real-life conference room using the 3D audio software from Martyn and some MIDI sound cues from SL. That wasn’t quite so cool because of lag on the Second Life connection.

During lunch we all had ample opportunity to do the networking thing. In addition to the speakers and some University types, I got chatting to Tom Williams (MD Bessacarr Publications) about their work producing conventional guides to heritage sites and their moves into the digital space, to Mike Short (VP R&D, O2) about mobile applications, pervasive media, and the current Technology Strategy Board funding; Clayton Shaw (Arts Council England about all things digital, arty and socially media & mediated, and Geny Calosi (Assistant Editor for AV Publishing about pervasive media, social media, and University/Industry collaboration. There were about 50 folks all told so a very good mix of interests and perspectives.

Mar 05

Serious fun in Coventry, part the first

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This is one of a serious of posts about the Culture, Heritage & Tourism Technology Workshop at the Serious Games Institute on Tues, 4 March. The event was streamed to the SGI island in SecondLife but I can’t find a link to the slides or any recorded version.

The first session was kicked off by Professor Bob Stone from the Human Interface Technologies group at Birmingham University discussing Virtual Heritage, “Then & Now”. After a quick overview of the history of VR and location reproduction, Bob showed a couple of the older projects and touched on their work with Virtual Stonehenge (which suffered from some clumsy marketing/PR from Intel).

He then touched on a new human factors guidelines for virtual worlds that is about to be published (its currently being vetted by MoD). This should begin to formalise the experiences of the last +10 years into VR. He also mentioned the Virtual heritage network and VIZIN NIZIA (can’t find a website for this) as resources for folks interested in getting into this field (or learning from it).

A few very cool uses of CR that Bob described were Virtual snowshoe mountain, where real meteorological data was being using to show the mountain through the seasons but also demonstrate the effects of climate change over longer time periods. A Virtual great barrier reef where they could model the effect of human intervention and pollution, along with making a CAVE environment for virtual visitors. And a VR dreamscape formed from elements of Lowry’s pictures and reformed into a walk through animation.

Current Work included modelling the Scylla to verify artificial life models. Virtual Scylla blends highly accurate sidescan sonar of the Leander Class frigate with models of how seaweed, fish and silt blooms are degrading the ship faster than expected. There is a serious side to this in that a major tourist site is becoming a potential hazard to diving.

Bob then showed us a quick revisit of Virtual Stonehenge running on the Quest 3D game engine. This allows Bob and his team to link multi-media objects to in-game items quickly and much greater realism that their earlier Stonehenge project.

Mike Gogan, The Virtual Experience Company (now part of Blitz Games) presented 3D Visualisations for Virtual Experience and the interpretation of heritage sites. Having begun some years ago with very (by today’s standards) simple representations of Shakespeare’s birthplace, what Mike was focused on was the story of the heritage site. Mike stressed the need to working subject matter experts for the content but to build in interpretation experts to connect with the audience (and to work out who the audience is).

Around about this the backchannel on Second Life started to heat up. Apparently folks couldn’t see the presenter (cause it was dark) so it just went from night to noon. Folks happier! Except for when the presenter’s didn’t use the mic’s. :)

Anyway, back to Mike who was now giving us a flythrough of the Houses of Parliament around 1440. Someone asked about using advertising in-games / media funding to pay for experiences. This wasn’t something that Mike was working on but it might be something to be developed, Blitz have made adver-games for other platforms / purposes.

Last up (before coffee) was Martyn Ware (Future of Sound, Illustrious Company, founding member of The Human League and Heaven 17) with some staggeringly cool examples of 3D soundscape projects from around the world. The focus was on building immersive 3D soundscapes, emotionally engaging experiences through audio. His ambition was to build a “better than Star-trek holo-deck”. Part of the demo was a slightly disconcerting, but very impressive flight of a bird around the room (on the tech front Martyn can control up to 16 sounds, sync’d with 25fps for video meshing).

He was also experimenting with using 3D soundscapes to transport experiences to other locations (Mexico City in Long Beach California). They were also playing with city-scaping (LondonScape) – audio abstraction of a city rather than a representation of that city. The headline project that was on teh title of the presentation was Rome Reborn 1.0 – set in 400ad, Martyn was planning a full 3D sound experience to match the VR experience to convince you you’re in ancient rome. One setting that is in discussion was to repopulate the coliseum with 50k Romans cheering their gladiator.

Another (smaller but no less interesting) project was a sensory theatre at Threeways School in Bath due to opening later in 2008.

I’d really like to get Martyn involved in some research or demonstration projects at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol.

And then there was coffee!!