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.

17.09.09 Project Team Meeting

Notes from today's project team meeting...

Puja has been working on the terrain modelling and all the proposed squares are now being finalised and put into place. This is expected to be completed in the next couple of weeks. Panagiotis has been developing the specification for modelling the blocks that will represent the individual spaces within the university buildings. The team will be working with Masters Students to develop this representation of space over the next few months. The launch of uCampus 0.5 has been a landmark for the team and Darren has been at work debugging the new platform, improving performance and usability. Howard has been working on the evaluation reports from practicing architects and students that have been trailing the platform.

The next step in the project is to plan the major development packages up to the New Year. This will involve the last major innovations in the platform and significantly raise the level of useful application that is available. This process involves expanding the taxonomy of spaces and then being able to filter searches and visualisation of different aspects of the building models, from types of spaces through to structural elements of the building.

uCampus version 0.5 is released

We have now released version 0.5 of uCampus. This is a major update for the platform which now supports the visualisation of the taxonomy of spaces. This has been an important requirement in the project plan from the outset and so it is wonderful to finally see it realised after so much developmental effort. We hope that this feature will prove to be of significant practical value to our exising user base.

From a development perspective, support for this feature required careful consideration during the analysis and design phases. As is typical of web-applications, integration required work both on the client side and server sides. For the client this meant designing and implementing a simple and consistent user interface component to fit into our client application in a seamless manner without over complicating or cluttering the existing interface. During development, care was taken to ensure that this component integrated well with the platform as a whole and there were no hidden side effects or regression artefacts caused by its addition. Our client is based upon a document-view architecture where there can be multiple views of the same data which all have to be synchronized so that they function in unison.

More development was required to support the taxonomy of spaces on the server side. Our entire platform has been developed under Java, with Enterprise Java being deployed on the server. We approach our web-development following the standard three-tier design pattern for web-applications with presentation, service and data tiers. Consequently, every new feature that we introduce necessitates additions and amendments to each of these tiers. The carefully considered choice of Java at the beginning of the project anticipated this and has allowed us to streamline the development process which does help to simplify the process somewhat. We can benefit from code and object reuse between tiers without the complication of having to concern ourselves with interoperability issues that may have arisen otherwise.

Supporting the new taxonomy meant additions to our xml schema and these also had to be supported in the respective components of the data tier. This required some modification and extension to our existing SAX and DOM parser engines and extension to the objects that they instanced. Once this had been achieved amendments to the service tier could be applied. To service the taxonomy models required upgrading the existing model server. This module manages and controls the serialisation of our models to the client. Care had to be taken to ensure any changes that were made in this area of the code didn't break our existing functionality and some regression testing was undertaken to ensure that this was indeed the case. This was slightly complicated by our server already being live with existing users. Mid-way through the process we also migrated our platform to a new server which meant rotating the server IPs in the client to check it still worked. Finally, support was added in the presentation tier for the client interface and testing of models could proceed.

We now have an important part of the project complete which we hope will open up new development paths for us in the future. We are now able to consider further extensions of our model server module to include a planned X3D manipulation engine which will allow us to perform boolean operations upon our existing model database. This will allow us to enhance the resolution and provide greater control of the models requested by our users. Having provided a sound basis for future expansion, we are looking forward to the next phase of the project.