Daden – Ciaran Laval

I’m having a busy week with birthdays and visitors from the emerald isle, so I’m a bit behind on virtual world news but I will highlight a few interesting looking stories that are doing the rounds.

Hypergrid Business report : Daden awarded £230,000 for virtual field trips. I might need to acknowledge some bias here. I come from the same city as Daden. However I won’t allow that to cloud my judgement. The Hypergrid Business report article informs us :

Daden Limited – a virtual reality specialist based at the Innovation Birmingham Campus – has been awarded nearly £230,000 by Innovate UK for its Virtual Field Trips as a Service initiative.

The funding has been awarded in phase two of Innovate UK’s Design for Impact Competition, which aims to identify and then support innovative technology that has been proven in pilot projects in education, but is yet to have a national impact. Daden, working with The Open University (OU), the Field Studies Council and Birmingham-based Design Thinkers UK, has been awarded the funding to develop its Virtual Field Trips as a Service concept as a national service for schools and universities.

The article further states :

From November 2014 to April 2015, Daden worked with teachers and students at Washwood Heath Academy in Birmingham, virtual world educators in Second Life, university lecturers at a Royal Geological Society workshop, and a range of other stakeholders to understand the potential, challenges and key features of any virtual field trip service.

David Burden added: “Virtual Field Trips as a Service is intended to support, not replace, physical field trips. It will help students and staff better prepare for a field trip, can provide additional context and gives a focus for post-field trip data analysis, revision, virtual visits to comparative sites, and provides a catch-up for those who may have missed the physical trip. Whilst this funded project is focused on UK education there are obvious opportunities overseas, particularly for virtual ‘exchange’ field trips.”

The issue of virtual field trips keeps coming up. Field trips are certainly seen as a good use case for virtual worlds and virtual reality so it’s encouraging to see a company who are embracing the concept.

Continue reading “Daden Awarded Grant For Virtual Field Trips, Second Life Is Good For Your Health & Bigger Than You May Think”

I found myself at The Daden Virtual Campus in Unity Web Player thanks to a mail to a mailing list asking whether virtual reality is too real. This was my first visit to a virtual world in Unity, more on that later. However the reason I was there in the first place was due to the Daden July 2014 newsletter (PDF link), which talks about virtual reality. The news letter talks about the Daden Virtual Reality campus at the top but at the bottom moves on to virtual reality.

Virtual reality seems to be back in vogue, to some of us, it never really went away whereas to others, they are still waiting for the great leap forward when it arrives. However the Oculus Rift development, largely led by Facebook’s purchase of Oculus has made virtual reality a topic of discussion again. Whereas I still have very grave misgivings about Facebook’s purchase of Oculus, you can’t help but admire the way that Facebook’s name has helped to make virtual reality a newsworthy item once again.

So back to the mailing list, Dr Michael Vallance ponders :

One of the frustrations I constantly come up against at university conferences is the use of the term “virtual”. I have been involved developing and researching virtual worlds for the past 6 years so to me “virtual worlds” seem the most appropriate “meme”. It seems that the term virtual “reality” has baggage from previous attempts of similar technology. The older academics associate “Virtual” with “virtual reality” and consequently they deem that anything ‘virtual’ is an attempt to replicate “reality” complete with real-world physics such as gravity and form. To some computer science academics, if a development of a virtual space does not have real world replication then it is not virtual. They call it “artificial” which, to me, is incorrect. I argue that a virtual world can be a simulation and it can also be fantasy. It is not necessarily virtual “reality”.

The first thing I thought of when I read this was Gene Roddenberry Jr’s visit to Second Life back in the summer of 2009. Good grief was it really that long ago? As well as describing Second Life as a “cool cool area” and being impressed that there were furries present, he was also impressed by the physics defying fact that he could fly in Second Life. This is something I’ve seen mentioned before regarding virtual worlds, that the laws of physics do not apply, that they are indeed, very different from reality and how cool that is.

However here I realised that all of my thoughts are indeed about virtual worlds, the discussion is rarely about virtual reality, so I think Dr Vallance is onto something when he says that virtual worlds seems the more appropriate choice of words. This may seem a little pedantic but I definitely do think of these spaces as virtual worlds rather than virtual reality.

In many ways it’s a waste of opportunity to stick to the laws of real life physics in any virtual space, be it virtual worlds or virtual reality. This is part of the beauty of going virtual.

Continue reading “Is Virtual Reality Too Real?”