If you have not yet encountered the terms ‘serious games’ and ‘3-D web’, remember that you heard them here first, because both are likely to sit at the heart of much future innovation with online public services.
Experiments with virtual worlds such as Second Life have been underway for some time, but one Liverpool-based company, Lateral Visions, is integrating the 3-D concept with the web to offer scope for a different level of interactivity.
The company (http://www.lateralvisions.co.uk/) was co-founded in 2003 by Carl Gavin and Stephen Clibbery, who used to work for computer games firm Codemasters. The two saw an opportunity to use 3-D games technology for non-entertainment purposes such as marketing, business, education and training – an area that has become known as ‘serious games’.
Several of the company’s early projects have had a public service element, such as an educational driving simulation with a difference for schoolchildren, commissioned by North Wales Police.
Using experience gained from working on the Colin McRae rally car racing game series at Codemasters, Lateral Visions designed the simulation to be realistic and engaging, but it was actually aimed at demonstrating how tricky and how dangerous driving can be in the real world. “It had the message: think about safety, roads are dangerous place, not a game,” says Clibbery.
Other ‘serious games’ have included ‘Racing Academy’ for the government-backed educational charity Furelab, which combined racing simulation with learning about principles of physics, maths and engineering, as demonstrated by varying types of engine, tyres, gear ratios and other aspects of the cars.
The company has also developed a blend between 3-D virtual tours of actual physical and historical locations with gaming elements, with particular application in the heritage sector.
In ‘The Middleton Mystery – An Adventure at Belsay Hall’, a game developed for English Heritage with input from local schoolchildren (http://www.picturehousebelsay.co.uk/middletonmystery/), a fictional quest-based adventure game was based around a representation of the Northumberland stately home Belsay Hall.
Players meet characters based on real people who lived and worked at Belsay and find imaginary treasures brought back from Charles Monck’s Grand Tour. The schoolchildren helped explore the history and filmed themselves as historical characters.
Also in development is Virtual Knaresborough Castle, a commission for Renaissance Knaresborough, a regeneration body led by Harrogate Borough Council.
The castle is being recreated in a virtual environment as it would have looked around 1315, and the company is again working with students and staff at a local school. Players will have to undertake a series of tasks to find their way home.
In a third virtual environment project, Lateral Visions is creating an interactive 3-D visualisation of the historic headquarters, library and biological specimen collections of the Linnean Society of London.
It was a demonstration of these projects that led to the company being commissioned to develop a piece of work for the E-Delivery Team (EDT), a former unit in the Cabinet Office which in April 2008 moved to the Department for Work and Pensions when the latter took charge of the Government Gateway, the infrastructure allowing government, citizens and businesses to communicate securely online.
EDT runs a special programme entitled ‘The key – unlocking innovation in government,’ with support from the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. The programme aims to support the public sector in developing and sharing innovation, and provide more effective access to government decision-makers by innovative small businesses. Lateral Visions’ work was first brought to the attention of EDT by Atos Origin, the company contracted to deliver the Government Gateway.
“Lateral Visions showed me some work they had done for the Linnean Society of London, which replicated the society’s historical headquarters building, and some work in the education sector,” says Damien Kennedy of EDT. “The technology really blew me away – it is visually outstanding. It is an appealing proposition for government to use 3-D web environments, and with Lateral Visions technology which can be hosted locally.
“I asked if they would like to do some work with me developing a strong visual presence to promote our facilities, and they created an innovation reception area that you can explore with a number of interactive boards and streaming videos. It made the innovation lab look really good, and we are using it internally.”
The strength of Lateral Visions’ technology is that it does not require the user to donwload and run a separate piece of specialist software to explore a 3-D virtual environment, as with for example the virtual world of Second Life. Instead, it uses a ‘3D web browser core’, a small plug-in to a standard web browser.
“We are developing and refining close integration of 3-D and web.” says Stephen Clibbery. “Previously you didn’t do 3-D on the web.”
A live trial of the system can be found online at:
http://www.lv3dweb.net
Here visitors can explore a realistic 3-D environment in their normal web browser. If you walk up the curving staircase, a ‘world portal’ embedded in a pillar transports you to a view of the EDT innovation reception area, where you can navigate through materials such as videos and powerpoint slides within the 3-D environment.
The power of the concept is clearly felt by the ability to ‘walk’ between websites, entering a new site like Alice stepping through the looking glass. Each site or world can be held on a different server, run by a different organisation, and connected through the ordinary web: in effect, they are 3-D hyperlinks. What is more, the two-dimensional web can be seamlessly integrated into the 3-D environment: a feature involving a right-click on the mouse means you can walk up to any flat surface in the 3-D world and open a real web browser, browsing sites of viewing document in real time.
Currently Lateral Visions is creating the systems for DWP but eventually tools will be available so others can do the same, Clibbery says. “For now, we build the sites, but in the future it will be much easier for anyone to build 3-D sites using a visual interface.”
Other open 3-D technologies will also emerge, taking their place alongside established systems such as Second Life, which could also open up and merge with the wider internet.
Damie Kennedy of EDT is excited about the prospects. “I can see the potential for this technology being used across the whole public sector, particularly in areas like education, the police and the NHS”, he says. “It is visually powerful, interactive and makes browsing a completely different experience. It would be very attractive, particularly younger people.”
I watched The Matrix again last night, on the 10th anniversary of it’s release. The 3d web seems like a retrograde step to me – as Morpheus says about Neo’s appearance upon his first visit back to the matrix: “residual self-image, the mental projection of your digital self”. It appeals to desperate attempts to translate the web into something familiar and, unfortunately, many of the Internet’s best features are lost as a result. Why do we want to return to the “prison” of 3 dimensions?
I’ve tried Second Life. My overwhelming impression is that this sort of technology, while eye catching, is a waste of time. The informative content of any given view screen is very low: data interactivity is bound by physical constraints. Most of the actual work/ value process takes place through the built-in Browser anyway!
On the other hand, virtual interaction in the physical world is far more interesting: smart phones, location-based services, even games (http://pacmanhattan.com/).
NB: I couldn’t try lv3d because they don’t support osx or linux yet.
I totally agree and I think most people are catching on as the likes of second live are becoming abandoned virtual wastelands.
I had a look into Lateral Visions 3D Web though and I think they may have got it right.
Building a 3D platform that is fundamentally the same and the Web and can integrate with it, not try and replace it sitting on some special servers somewhere.
More info here:
http://www.lateralvisions.com/3D_Web_Technology/Overview.aspx
or a pretty cool example of it actually in use http://3d.linnean.org.uk
The above comment is right though as it does only support browsers on windows at the mo. Their website says other platform support is on the way though.
Dave