weCAMP JISC Programme Meeting Manchester Poster Image

Representing the weCAMP project team, Leo, Panagiotis and Chengzhi attended the JISC Institutional Innovation Programme meeting held at the MacDonald Hotel Manchester on 23 and 24 April 2009. The SSBR Team had done an excellent job in making the event useful to advancing all projects. We particularly benefitted from the discussions with the Erewhon and i-Borrow teams within the cluster. We very much look forward to the Assembly activities as planned.

JISC Manchester Programme Meeting

We are currently taking part in a very productive meeting for all the programme research groups. We have been developing links with several project teams and generating proposals for future assemblies.

The I-borrow team, Christ Church University, Canterbury are keen to work with us to embed their project [the geo-location system for laptops in a new learning facility] by using the Ucampus system as a framework into which a model of their new learning facility can be added and then the data from the laptop locations inputted. It is an exciting opportunity to test the application potential of Ucampus.

Additional collaboration with other research groups to follow...

JISC meeting Preparation

Preparations for the JISC meeting/conference in Manchester are well underway. Ucampus 0.03a will be used at the meeting with delegates being able to use and test the platform for themselves. The poster is being developed. A sample image below gives a taster of how it will turn out.

08.04.09 Project Team Meeting

Notes from last week’s project meeting...

Darren has been working on fine tuning the user account system on Ucampus, allowing users to experiment with building designs in private or in the public domain. One crucial addition is the ability for users to delete their work! Changes to the user interface also make it easier to navigate and are more intuitive when selecting spaces and places around the university campus. The next couple of week’s work will focus on making the base campus map interactive.

Puja has been working on developing the background map to sit behind an SVG layer, adding additional landscaping elements. Within the interactive model, the appearance of the terrain has been altered to make it easier on the eye as well as providing a suitable background to the 3d models. Our aim is to have 83 squares of terrain modelled at the culmination of the project.

Panagiotis has been developing new 3d building models and enhancing the colour schemes for the 3d models to make them more visually accessible. An improved ‘walk’ facility now allows users to navigate around the 3d landscape and into buildings, which begins to highlight the complexity of the models being created. This facility also opens up opportunities for creating animated functions, including virtual tours round buildings and departments.

Howard has been developing detailed proposals for future evaluation workshops, including the activities that users will undertake and ways of publicising the events.

One issue raised in the meeting was the importance of writing/creating a user guide for the Ucampus system. Although there is a help function on the user interface, this only supplies minimal information. As a wider base of users start to interact with the system, such a facility will be crucial to its usability.

uCampus Release 0.03a

Today is another important day to mark in the weCAMP project history. After 12 working days since the release of uCampusClient 0.02a, Dr Darren Roberts makes Release 0.03a available this afternoon. This version implements User Account Management (UAM) and various refinements to the user interface.

Why User Account Management?
UAM is something that I have always wanted since the old days of SUCoD. It has been widely reported that End-User Privacy is an important requirement to be fulfilled in order to achieve a higher level of usability of an interactive urban contextual modelling platform. Design practitioners are reluctant to make their early design ideas known to the public. They want to try out some initial ideas in privacy until the designs are developed to a certain extent that they are happy with.

What Darren has delivered through the current UAM is exactly the privacy that end users need when performing personal online experiment. A registered user of uCampus will be given a username and password controlled account where all the models uploaded by the user will be hosted. No other users can see these models held in private accounts until the owners of the models explicitly make them published in the "public" domain.

UAM can also be used in team working by a group of users sharing an account with the same usernsame and password as set up by themselves. When this group of users login to uCampus with their joint account, they will be shown all the models they have uploaded as a team.

How well uCampus UAM will be received by the users is yet to be tested. The first weCAMP Project Workshop will be an ideal occasion to work this out.

Seeing it on uCampus!

To echo Howard's latest post, I would like to post some snap shots of the new Learning Hub as proposed by the Team A students working up to the Review 2 session on 20 March 2009 at the School of Architecture.

I have uploaded their core design onto uCampus on their behalf to make it viewable to other students as an example of how the uCampus platform could be used to visualise 3D design proposals in the University campus context as modelled by the JISC Project Team.

Starting the evaluation process in earnest

Now the project is underway, and looking very impressive, it is time to start the evaluation process in earnest. The first external group of users are beginning to get to grips with the platform. This group is an MArch group co-ordinated by Chengzhi. They are developing 3D visualisations of assorted schemes for the development of the Jessop Edwardian Wing and the vacant Jessop East site. They are now three weeks into the project and the schemes are developing well. All groups have appeared reticent to engage fully with UCampus but those that have made some explorations are beginning to show some interesting results. Perhaps the most graphic of these - and certainly the one that has caused the greatest discussion within the project team - is the team that have exported the model and then texture mapped building facades onto the model.

The impact on the team has been one of really focusing what we are trying to achieve. It is interesting that this discussion has occured in the same week that Google Maps Street View has gone live. The focus of the model is not a photorealistic representation of the campus, and in this we cannot compete with Street View. We are creating a conceptual and analytical tool that allows the exploration of the campus at a variety of levels. One criticism levelled at the model in its current guise is that at times it becomes difficult to read as buildings tend to merge into one another from certain view points. It is now important that we start to work on how we are representing data within the buildings as this will directly impact on how the exterior of the buildings are mapped. Now is the time to start refining the graphical representation of the platform and maintain a real architectural quality to the information available.