External Evaluation Meeting 13.01.2010

James Pinder and Diane Hart, the project external evaluators, led a team workshop to discuss the progress of the project, the results of which will feed into the summative evaluation.

The team covered a lot of ground that involved reflecting on the initial project aims and objectives and contrasting them with what had been acheived so far in the project. Married to this was further discussion about an external dissemination strategy for the project.

The external evaluation report is aimed to be complete by the end of February.

Project Board Meeting 14.01.2010

The weCAMP project kicked-off the New Year with a Project Board meeting. The aim of this meeting was to receive project steering input from the board to make effective use of the final three months of the project.

As a summary of buildings in uCampus we have now modelled over 300, 48 Grid Blocks (48+ Hectares), 38 Groups of Non-uni Buildings, 69 University Buildings, 90 Uni-Building Floors and 13 Spatial Taxonomical Models. We are aiming for 75 university buildings for the end of the project.

Darren presented the uCampus 1.0 release candidate platform - the final release of the platform for the weCAMP project. The principal development from 0.51 is the ability to visualise the spatial uses of rooms within a range of university buildings. Each room has a specific colour tag which can be turned on or off. Colour coded room uses can be viewed across any number of buildings simultaneously.

The meeting discussion focused on dissemination planning and developing new avenues for project development within The University of Sheffield and other institutions after the JISC project funding is concluded.

I-borrow Assembly in Canterbury

Three members of the team attended the I-borrow Assembly on 11th December and enjoyed a fascinating day beign shown round Augustine House and learning more about the process and results of the I-borrow project.

Part of the day involved discussing future collaborations and possible BR proposals along with the SMART project team at New Bucks University. It was great to meet face to face. We hope to further develop collaborations in the New Year.

Many thanks to everyone in the I-borrow team for organising and hosting the day.

The Augustine House Experiment

The weCamp team has successfully bid for and been granted JISC funding for a benefits realisation project to develop a 3D visualisation with the I-Borrow team from Canterbury Christ Church University. The project aims to represent the data collected from mobile laptop usage within Augustine House - a new learning centre at CCCU. Partners from Bucks New University will also be involved as part of the project evaluation.

Modelling the Students' Union Redevelopment

We have been working with Students' Union staff since early October 2009 to create 3D models of the Union building's redevelopment. I see this is a great opportunity to engage uCampus with a real user group and test out the methodologies and technologies we have developed so far.

All is going really well. We have now completed what is called Union MODEL 1 project which intends to visualise the entire Union building under construction. MODEL 1 is built in six levels, and each level contains at least three layers: Floor, Spatial Taxonomy, and Signage. MODEL 1 is our first case study into the use of Image Texture of X3D in producing the Signage layers to show the Union's outlets in a more recognisable manner.

The test video clip below is generated to show a navigational route starting from the new East Entrance on Level 2 to the Source area on Level 3. The idea is that multiple such routes will be generated on the basis of Union MODEL 1 and make them readily accessible from the Students' Union Website.

A WMV clip of tour around the Union of Students

During the visit to the Union's Marketing and Communications Team, we were asked if a video clip could be porduced to show a navigation sequence inside the Union buildling. Back in my room, to build an example, I used a desktop video capture package call CaptureWizPro (free trial version) to generate a WMV clip while navigating around the Union building on uCampus.

The clip shows how Leo and I reached the meeting room from the Union's main entrance. X3D player such as Octaga Player Pro has a built-in vedio capturing facility which may speed up the production of navigational clips.

Meeting with the Students Union representatives

We have just met with representatives from the University of Sheffield Students Union to discuss collaborating on developing our visualisation of the Students Union building to aid students and staff with the development of the new union building. We discussed a number of exciting ways that we could explore benefits offered by uCampus.

Lisa Scanlon and her marketing and communications team talked about the need to create flexible space for students to utilise in the union building; for collaborative working, society meetings, and a whole range of learning situations. We understand that whilst this space has been outlined the need to carefully consider the range of facilities, functions, thresholds and boundaries that can be provided and the necessity for students to be engaged in this design and planning process is crucial and yet to be determined. We feel that this would be a good opportunity to work together, using uCampus as a tool to help this process.

In the short-term, developing a 3-D model of the existing union building to show how it can be accessed during the construction and regeneration of the union building. This may include highlighting temporary entrance routes etc.

In the medium-term, developing fly-throughs or virtual tours of the new building to help introduce it to staff and students. In addition providing a model that students can explore at their leisure, before they have even been to Sheffield, to explore the myriad of opportunities that the union offers. This could be as much about learning opportunities as access to bars and shops. The impact that this could have on aiding student induction could be very powerful.

We have concluded that Lisa and her team will develop a wish-list of what they would like to explore and we will then provide information on how this can be achieved in order to move forward so that they outputs are in-step with the imminent building work.