All about Google Cardboard

We've just added a short introduction to the Google Cardboard VR "headset", and some ideas about how you could use Google Cardboard and its VR experience in your organisation. Visit our Google Cardboard page now.

VR and AI at the Edinburgh Fringe

Whilst up at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last week two shows caught my eye from a Daden perspective, I caught one and my daughter caught the other. 

ABACUS (Sundance Version) Trailer from Lars Jan on Vimeo.

ABACUS was a "presentation" by "Japanese cult-icon Paul Abacus" in the style of a visuals rich TED talk, filmed live by two steadicam operators. The visuals were very "Datascape" at times, 3D graphics over the Earth's surface", and some of the graphs were even based on Second Life stats! But as it the style of so many of these things what starts out straight soon begins to slowly collapse as the "presenter" goes off-piste, rages against the world, and goes ever so slightly mad. Apparently "Paul Abacus" is the fictional creation of Los Angeles-based director Lars Jan, and the show (and unveiling) caused quite a storm at the Sundance festival. It was OK, but one can't help feeling it needed to be either more real and straight, or far more off the wall.

The second show was Spillikin, which featured the Robothespian robot as a robot/AI created by a dying husband to keep his wife, who as Alzheimer's, company. As the show notes say "... the husband, already an obsessive archivist, builds a perfected robotic version of himself, to be deployed after his death: a patient carer, an aide-memoir, a singing partner, able to give order to her confusion, and to bear without complaint the endless repetition required to reassure her." We've seen a number of academic projects using chatbots to support Alzheimer's sufferers in just this way, and we're currently working on a Digital Immortality paper which also looks at some of the issues about achieving agency after death.

Cardboard vs Rift

Over the last few weeks we've finally had time to start playing with Google Cardboard - and I must say we are impressed. Whereas Oculus DK1 was great, but then DK2 was such a pain that we dread getting it out of the cupboard Google Cardboard is a joy to use, and might even drive me to buy an Android phone!

For those that aren't familiar with Cardboard it IS just a cardboard holder (and a couple of lenses) for your smartphone. You can build one yourself (details at https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/get-cardboard/), or buy a kit for about £10 on Amazon. Then fold the eye hood over, slide your mobile phone in and away you go. The phone's sensors are used to do the basic rotational head-tracking, and there's a single button on the box which triggers a single touch to the screen, and that's it.

What stunned us at first was the quality. With a MotoX its about the same as DK2, and with a Samsung Galaxy S6 it feels better than DK2. You don't get lateral head tracking, which needs an extra sensor anyway on the Oculus, but that's hardly vital. The big downside is that you have to hold the box in place with your hands (the strap that came with ours was useless), so you can't hold a game controller or joystick to control your movement. However the big upside is that you just have to hold the box in place with your hands!  Just pick up and go. No complex PC configurations, no leads running everywhere and trying to peek out from under the headset to see the keyboard. Just hold it to your eyes and you are away! Combine this immediacy with the fact that anyone could have hundreds of these available ($10 each and bring-your-own-phone) in a class or business and all of a sudden VR seems much more feasible right now from a business point of view.

The big technical challenge initially is how to design the UI. You only have gaze and one button, and it's interesting that the most common solution at the moment is actually the same as we developed for the Oculus Rift version of Daden Campus -  if you stare at something it becomes active, and they either stare a bit longer and it activates, or it waits for the key press to activate. Simple. Using this model even movement becomes easy to implement, stare at you feet to start moving, you walk in the direction you are looking so you can steer as you go, look at your feet again to stop.

We're now working up our first Cardboard demo app which we should have available in the next few weeks, and then we'll do a Cardboard version of Daden Campus and build Cardboard support into all our demos and projects from then on. I'll then have to have a Cardboard on me whenever I go to events and meetings, and the Android phone to go with it!

All we now need is a simple head-frame to give you the proper hands-free for when you need it, something like a cross-platform Samsung VR Gear, or better still a low cost option like the Durovis or XG VR.

If you'd like to read more about VR then download our white paper on Virtual Reality, and if you'd like to have a demo, or would like us to create a VR experience for you, your students, employees or customers then just get in touch. 

Daden New Starters

We'd like to welcome Joe and Ishaq to Team Daden. Both are recent graduates, Joe from the University of Birmingham and Ishaq from Birmingham City University. Both have joined as junior developers. Joe is working on migrating our Discourse chatbot code from Perl to C#/ASP.NET (something that has been on the to-do list for years), and Ishaq is updating our Virtual Reality demos and getting to grips with WebGL ready to start work on the WebGL version of Datascape2 - cunningly named DatascapeGL!

Work Experience - Abbas

Abbas, a year 10 student from a local Birmingham school joined us for 8 days this summer. As well as helping out on tasks around the office we also gave him the opportunity to learn some C# and Unity programming, and play with Google Cardboard. Here is his report.

"Over the eight days that I have been at Daden, I have learnt new skills and have experienced what working life is like.

On the first day that I arrived, I was given a sheet of paper on which David (MD) had listed some possible tasks for me to complete (one of them was to write a blog post), also included in the list were two coding challenges, in the first I was expected to create a program that reflected the average mathematical capabilities of a human. My second challenge was to write a program that displayed numbers such as 9,999,999 in words in the same way a human would say it.

On the second day, I decided to undertake a new challenge, and I began learning 'C#'.

It was far more verbose and complex than Python (which was the only programming language I was familiar with at the time). Once I had gained a decent understanding of the language, my colleagues assisted me in writing functional bubble sort and binary chop search programs. I then started working with Unity and created a simple 3D ball game. While I was building the game, I learned fundamental Unity skills which I could build upon.

Overall, I have definitely gained a lot from this experience; my level of ability and understanding of programming has undoubtedly improved from eight days ago. Along with that, this experience has also given me an idea as to what a working environment is like."

Thanks Abbas, it was great to have you with us, and all the best for your future studies.

Virtual Field Trips at Collaboration Nation

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.

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.

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.

Datascape in InnovateUK Best Practice report on DataViz

Daden is honoured to be not only included in InnovateUK's new report on design and best practice in data visualisation but also to have a Datascape image as the front cover of the report. You can read the InnovateUK blog post and download a copy of the report.