Wednesday, 29 April 2009

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.

Friday, 24 April 2009

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...

Thursday, 16 April 2009

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.