Recently in News Category

Daden has scored a double success by being the only UK company to become a finalist in two categories of the U.S. Federal Government's Virtual World Challenge (FVWC). We entered our PIVOTE and Datascape systems into the Challenge, and have now been invited to the Defense GameTech Users Conference in Orlando Florida at the end of March for the finals.

The Challenge was launched by the U.S. Army Simulation & Training Technology Center, in order to reach a global development community to provide innovative and interactive training and analysis solutions in virtual worlds. The audience includes all United States Government Departments and Agencies, including Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Transportation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Health and Human Services. Read the full announcement.

Due to our continued expansion Daden moves formally into its new offices in Birmingham Science Park on Monday 1st March. You can find postal address, map and travel details on our new directions page. If ever you're up in Birmingham just give us a call and pop in!

We also have a new office number - +44 (0)121 250 5678. We'll be sending full details out shortly to our contacts to remind them to update their contact lists.

Due to continued expansion we are now looking for 4 new team members covering 3D building, programming (C# and Perl), eLearning design/development/authoring and a production assistant. More details on our jobs page.

Two key posts this week, one from Techcrunch missing the point on AR vs VW (the answer is both btw!), and one from Mark Kingdon at Linden Lab setting out a path to Second Life HD. Also read David's own response to the TechCrunch post which shows the correct AR vs VW graph.

A new milestone in PIVOTE's life has been reached as we run the first dedicated PIVOTE stream at a vLearning event. Running as part of the National Workshop on Learning in Immersive Worlds, hosted by the Learning Innovation Applied Research Group at Coventry University, the event is taking place on 11 November 2009 at the Techno Centre in Coventry University's Technology Park. The PIVOTE stream will run from 1445 - 1615 and include presentations from Daden, St George's, North Ontario Medical School, the University of Surrey and the University of West England. Although primarily an RL event, several of the PIVOTE presentations will be done in SL at the Daden Cays auditorium, so if you want to join us in SL it will be great to see you.

Congratulations to St George's Hospital, University of London for winning the prestigious Times Higher Education Most Innovative ICT Project award for the PREVIEW project last night. Daden developed the virtual patient software behind PREVIEW, and it was that software that then become PIVOTE. But PREVIEW was a great team effort involving the eLearning team from St George's, the course tutors and professional paramedics, and of course the students. Read St Georges and JISC reports. For more details on PREVIEW go to http://www.elu.sgul.ac.uk/preview/blog/, and read about PIVOTE at http://www.daden.co.uk/pivote.html.

Analyst network GigaOm has just released a new report on the enterprise use of virtual worlds. They expect the enterprise virtual world market to reach "a critical mass in the next 12-24 months and doubling year over year", and to "grow into an industry earning $8 billion to $10 billion in annual revenue by 2014". Their conclusion - "companies large and small should immediately start pilot programs based around virtual worlds because the technology is delivering cost savings and improved operations. The time to begin is now."

We've just opened up our new Daden Space sim. The first build there is in honour of the Apollo 11 40th Anniversary and is a simulation of Tranquility Base. The simulation uses a HUD to display overlays of where the astronauts walked, call up images and video where they were taken, and interrogate the science experiments through links to the web. You can even watch the LM land and take-off. Full details in the Press Release. Video on YouTube and the SLURL is http://slurl.com/secondlife/daden space/127/127/301.

We've created a new set of single page flyers that summarise what Daden does. The flyers cover Daden as a whole, and then one on each of our 4 focus areas: Involve, Instruct, Interact and Integrate. You can download them directly from our downloads page.

We are pleased to announce that Daden is one of the first members of the Linden Lab Gold Solution Provider Program for Second Life developers. This means that we will be able to work more closely with Linden Lab to help clients use Second Life, and also that we can gain access to higher levels of support for our enterprise clients. Read the full press release.