22 May 2015

Virtual Field Trips at Collaboration Nation

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On 21st May we took part in Collaboration Nation, InnovateUK's celebration event for the 15 Design for Impact Feasibility projects (out of over 200 applications). Alongside the other projects we had 4 minutes(!) to present our work, as well as running a small stand in the networking area. There were around 100 delegates to the event, mainly drawn from major organisations (public and private sector) with an interest in technology in education. The image above shows our Virtual Field Trips team of David Burden (Daden CEO), Prof. Shailey Minocha from The Open University, and James Rock from Design Thinkers UK.

Our presentation went down well (despite video problems) and several people commented that the point where the avatar jumps up into the air and flys, and then the geological cross-section lifts up was one of their favourite parts of the morning.

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On our stand we were showing off both the original Virtual Skiddaw and the new Virtual Field Trip test-bed. One of the best examples of the test-bed was running a new version of our old Apollo 11 sim on both the laptop and the MotoX phone, and this being multi-user with both avatars being able to see each other - just shows that modern mobile phones are more than capable of running virtual world applications.

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And here to finish is the "team photo" of all 15 project teams! There was some great stuff being done and some noticeable clusters around 3D virtual worlds/Unity3D type tech, Arduino and maker bots, gestures/haptics and 3D printing. Interesting that there were no AR projects in the final 15. Hopefully all of us will find a way to bring our projects through development and on to market.