AtmosVR Event

We are pleased to announce that Daden have been invited to the ‘Reality in Virtual and Augmented worlds, Present and Future States’ event hosted by AtmosVR, as part of Birmingham Tech Week on Thursday 10th October 2019. 

Birmingham Tech Week is a collaborative series of events taking place across the City (and wider Greater Birmingham Region) between October 7th – 11th 2019. The week will highlight Birmingham’s burgeoning Tech Scene and focus on a number of innovative topics. AtmosVR presents a day of virtual and augmented reality discussions, networking and live demonstrations to offer attendees an insight into present status and future developments in these areas.

Daden will be at the event to showcase our products and the uses of them for key industries. If your interested in coming along and taking a look, we'd love to see you. 

Sign up here https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/reality-in-virtual-and-augmented-worlds-present-and-future-states-tickets-64627982034?ref=ecount

My Work Experience at Daden

My name is Moonis, I am a student from Bishop Vesey's Grammar School at Birmingham and for the last 2 weeks I have been here at Daden helping develop a project utilising the built-in speech recognition, text-to-speech and video APIs in the browser to produce an interactive experience for users, responding to questions asked by an animated figure.

Over these two weeks, the work has helped to develop my knowledge of both asynchronous JavaScript and NodeJs programming. I was also able to learn more about how a small business operates and the format of both company meetings and proposals for clients. I also had an amazing hands-on experience of the fairly recently released Oculus Quest technology.

More than anything else, however, I believe that these last 2 weeks were great because of the people, whom I have enjoyed being working with. There is a very pleasant atmosphere at Daden and you can tell the team truly take interest in their projects.

I enjoyed my time and felt that I was in good hands here at Daden. I would certainly be willing to come here again in the future.

Trainingscapes at the Future Education Trust for Leadership Summer Symposium

We were delighted to be invited by our client Bournemouth University to help showcase the work we are doing for them in VR training for midwives and nurses at the Future Education Trust for Leadership (FELT) Summer Symposium on "How technology will change teaching and education" held at the UK Parliament yesterday.

We'd rashly promised that we'd have Trainingscapes working on Oculus Quest for the event and we managed it, just! Denyse (left of picture, with Policy Connect CEO Jonathan Shaw trying the system out) brought BU's shiny new Quest and we brought 2 of our own (and a third turned up at the office today). Space-wise we only had two running in the end, but this is a far cry from the Rift demo's we've been doing as the Quests need minimal set-up, provide a stable environment, lots of good UI (showing real-world imagery whilst you define the guardian space and find the controllers) and all of a sudden VR is easy and you can afford to have multiple people try it at once!

Kneeling down to engage with a virtual 9 year old at eye-level

The content of the main symposium gave some interesting perspectives on technology in schools, FE and HE. Highlights for me were:

• Excellent chairing by Paralympian Lord Chris Holmes, and highlighting the ongoing need for assisstive technology, and including the best use of Peter Gabriel song (and album) titles ever
• Paul McKean from JISC providing a great future "day in the life" highlighting the role of tech, and also the fact that most tech mentioned is already in use somewhere (the old Gibson quote about the future is here already, its just not evenly distributed yet). Also some interesting thoughts on micro-credentials (mini/module-level qualifications) and how to aggregate those in the future.
• Maren Deepwell from ALT talking about how to make users of learning technology into critical users, so that they are aware of potential issues of bias from AI etc
• Deborah Millar from the Grimsby Institute of FE/HE talkign about their "Level Up" programme to upskill teachers in both LT and productivity and communications tools.
• Dick Palmer from TEN Group and FELTAG talking about how past visions haven't panned out (must look up the Learning 2020 one he mentioned), and the opportunities for new tech in the land-based industries (didn't have time to show him our virtual cows!)
• Interesting questions from the floor about personalisation of future LT, and the lack of skills in the current workforce and coming out of institutions in edutech learning design and authoring.

All in all a great day out!

Office4AI Ministerial Roundtable Discussion

On the 24th June 2019 Daden  attended an AI Roundtable Discussion with Margot James MP, Minister for Digital and the Creative Industries, on the Industrial Strategy AI Sector Deal Anniversary. The event was held to help the Office for AI plan its Year Two strategy.

The Roundtable explored how Government and Industry can build on the successes of the AI Sector Deal.  The AI Sector Deal which aims to realise AI potential in the UK with a support package of up to £0.95 billion for the sector including improving institutions that support AI, building a skilled workforce and stimulating access to data. The Roundtable included a discussion on regional opportunities and involved participants based in the Midlands from the tech sector, academia and public sector.

Topics discussed included issues around AI development in the UK, in particular the conflict between the need to access large amounts of data versus the users right to privacy. The need for data lakes (vast quantities of data stored in it’s raw format) from which AI can learn was stressed and that the time to begin capturing the data is now! 

It was also good to see some of the AI projects that local businesses are working on as well as being able to demonstrate the A.I. technologies that Daden are working on such as Virtual Life coaches and Virtual Personas.

All in all a valuable opportunity for us to contribute to these national AI initiatives, and we were honoured to have been asked to take part.

Daden selected by Thales as a Digital Maritime Pioneer

Daden are proud to have been selected as one of the Digital Maritime Pioneers by Thales.

Digital Transformation is changing the way both Defence and commercial organisations are operating in the maritime, land and air environments. Artificial Intelligence, Machine speed decision making and Virtual, Augmented and Mixed reality visualisation tools will all be part of Thales' digital offers in the future. Thales has been looking to rapidly assess these new technologies and build collaborative relationships with best of breed partners from wider markets, and to that end ran a Maritime Pioneers day in June at the Digital Catapult in London.

Thales reviewed 21 applications from some of the UK’s brightest and best start-ups and scale-ups in digital technologies, down selecting the six that responded most closely to the criteria, and whose products and expertise impressed the selection panel the most - one of whom was Daden!

Our pitch was based around the AViD project that we did for MOD DASA last year, which showed both 3D/VR subjective visualisation of maritime, aviation and -social media data, and conversational AI support in both the watch-keeping task and in controlling the visualisation environment.

We look forward to networking with the other winners and exploring with Thales how digital technologies such as AI, Augmented/Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality can be applied to maritime operations management.