Daden October Newsletter - Fieldscapes in Bournemouth, new iOS release, smart city data

In this latest issue of the Daden Newsletter we cover:

* Fieldscapes in action! - a report on the project we are doing with Bournemouth University to evaluate training midwifery students in 3D and VR.
* The new iOS release of Fieldscapes, and updates to the Android and VR user interfaces to increase usability
* Visualising Smart City data with Datascape
* The return of Abi - our virtual assistant chatbot

Remember you can try our products instantly and free of charge by going to:

* https://www.fieldscapesvr.com/download for Fieldscapes and Trainingscapes
* https://www.datascapevr.com/trial for Datascape

We hope you enjoy the newsletter, and do get in touch (http://www.daden.co.uk/#contact) if you would like to discuss any of the topics raised in the newsletter, or our products and services, in more detail!


** Download your PDF copy of the newsletter here .

Trees in Birmingham

The West Midlands Data Discovery Centre is publishing a wide and interesting set of open data on the West Midlands. Over the next few weeks we'll take a look at some of the data sets and use them to create visualisations in Datascape.

First up is a database of all the tress managed by the city's highways department. For each tree we have:

• Locations (lat/long)
• Height (shown as height on map)
• Age (shown as colour, yellow = new, green = mature, brown = old)
• Form (eg symmetric/non-symmetric - latter more at risk from storms, shown as shape)
• Species (shown in text)

This gives a low oblique view over the city, showing relative heights - as expected the younger trees tend to be smaller!

Close in on a set of pollarded and unbalanced trees. Bright green are mature, dull green are semi-mature. The small blue one has unspecified data.

We can use the standard Datascape search, filter and scrub features to help analyse the data.

We've published a subset of this visualisation to the web so that you can fly around and investigate it yourself. Just click on the image or link below.

Click link to view 3D visualisation in your browser.

More datasets from WMDDS to follow!

Fieldscapes 1.4 released

Fieldscapes v1.4 is now out and available for free download and had some good heavy user testing at Malvern recently with Year 7s from across the county. The main new features in v1.3 and v1.4 are:

• The start of support for NPC characters through an NPC widget. You can now add an NPC avatar as a prop and have it TP from location to location and activate specific animations - eg "sit". Later releases will allow the NPC to glide or walk between locations. We are also close to releasing a "chatbot" widget to hook an NPC up to an external chatbot system so that you can really start to create virtual characters.
• General improvements to the UI when in VR mode - users found that the "virtual iPAD" just got in the way so we're now putting the UI directly into the scene. We'll make steady improvements to the usability of the VR experience in future releases
• Added a new Avatar command to change clothes. This only changes between preset outfits but is good if a character needs to change into special kit for a task - for instance our nursing avatars putting on gloves and aprons (see below)
• Multiple choice questions are now randomised - makes the student think if they repeat the lesson!
• Increased the inventory limit from 3 to 5 in the editor - so you can bring in props from more inventories for your scene
• Increased the word count for multiple-choice panels and default popup panel

Various bug fixes were also made and you can see a full list at http://live.fieldscapesvr.com/Home/Download

v1.4 is already available for PC and Mac. The Android version of v1.4 is just under final testing, and we're also still progressing the iOS version of Fieldscapes through the App Store acceptance process.

Remember: We have an ongoing survey for new Fieldscapes features, please take 2-3 minutes to fill it out at: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/88YL39B

Fieldscapes at the Malvern Festival of Innovation

Oculus Rift on the Moon

For the second year in a row we ran a set of workshops at the Malvern Festival of Innovation playing host to a succession of groups of 20-30 students (mostly year 7s) from around Worcestershire and giving them a 1 hour introduction to immersive learning. We set up four stands in order to show the range of experiences and lessons that can be created, and the different ways in which they can be delivered. We had:

• One laptop running the Solar System lesson
• One laptop running the Apollo Educate lesson
• One laptop running the Introduction to Carding Mill (which several groups knew from Fieldtrips)
• A couple of Google Cardboards, one with the Photosphere tour of Carding Mill and one the Apollo Explore lesson
• Oculus Rift running Apollo Explore

Playing tag on the Moon!

Students were split into groups of about 5 and had 10 minutes on each "stand" - so everyone got to try all the kit.

Looking at the Waterspout Waterfall in a (plastic) Google Cardboard

Student feedback from comments and feedback forms included:

• "I wish I could spend all afternoon here"
• "Can I come back later?"
• "It was really cool"
• "It was fun to do"
• "It was memorable"
• "The realness of it"
• "I liked the fact that we were not there but we could see everything"
• "It was like it was real"
• "It was educating and fun"

Exploring the Moon and Apollo on Google Cardboard

When talking to the teacher we were keen to highlight that:

• They didn't have to buy any new hardware, like expensive VR headsets, as they can run lessons in 2D/3D mode on existing computers, or in VR on Google Cardboard (one teacher loaded the app onto his phone as we spoke)
• They could create their own lessons, share them, and use (and customise) those producted by other users
• With our licencing model they only started paying once they started using it in class, so they could explore and test for free until they were confident in the system and lessons and were ready to use it in class.

Even the teachers got in on the act!

Fieldscapes itself was rock solid on all the devices all day - despite getting a hammering from the kids. What was particularly impressive was when we had the Apollo experiences in multi-user mode so the kids could play tag on the moon - and even using the public wifi at the venue we had no issues with lag and avatar movement was very smooth.

All in all a great day and helped remind us all why we've built Fieldscapes!

Abi's Back!

Having been off on sabbatical for a few years whilst we rebuilt the web sites Abi, our virtual assistant is back up. We think she forgot a fair amount whilst she was backpacking around the world, but we'll slowly bring her up to speed, and she's got lots to learn about what with Datascape, Fieldscapes and Trainingscapes. One thing we have given her is the ability to load up web pages - we used to do this on client clients but never got around to doing it on our own!

So if you've got a question about Daden or any of our products just talk to Abi.

This new Abi is built on the Chatscript open source platform that we're using for all our chatbot projects now. She's not the smartest bot we've done, but does give you an idea of the basic sort of functionality and interaction style. When she loads she also provides a page which gives you some idea of her scope and some of the "tricks" we're teaching her.

You can read more about our chatbot work on our dedicated website at www.chatbots.co.uk.

Just get in touch if you'd like to know more about chatbot technology and have a project in mind.

For a quick trip down memory lane here are some of Abi's previous incarnations.

The very first ABI - text and static image in Second Life

Abi as an avatar walking around our old Sim in Second Life

Abi moved onto our website with an art-work avatar

Abi before she went on hols as a photoface avatar