DATASCAPE

Daden is my consulting company specialising in Virtual Reality and Virtual Human (AI) technologies.

​

I've been working with these technologies for over 15 years. Much of my work in 3D/VR is informed by working in Second Life  and similar virtual worlds, and with 3D game engines such as Unity prior to the current explosion in virtual reality, which is having to re-learn much of what was discovered in SL during 2006-2012. In fact my experience in 3D environments dates back to the mid 90s and technologies such as Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) and spaces such as Worlds Apart and ActiveWorlds. Daden immersive learning projects have twice been winning entries Times Higher Education Award for Outstanding Use of ICT.

​

My experience in chatbots and conversational has similarly deep roots, starting again in the mid/late 90s, working initially in Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) before developing my own conversational AI engine which has been used in various iterations on projects as diverse as an Arabic chatbot for Islamic education and a talking guide for the new Library of Birmingham to a Virtual Ship Persona for the Royal Navy. Daden bots have successfully passed two covert modified Turing Tests, one of which fooled 78% of users and the other 100%!

​

In the last few years I have also discovered that my long-time hobby of wargaming has suddenly become an area of immense interest to both military and civilian organisations - this breadth being better represented by the term scenario-gaming than war-gaming. Daden has already helped support the Army in wargaming activities, and developed two systems to help represent the modern information environment within a wargame context. I have written on wargaming within the hobby press, including a couple of para-academic papers, and am currently looking at beginning a PhD in Wargaming.

​

I have led and completed over two dozen R&D projects for the MOD and InnovateUK - the most substantial being the development of a complete VR training authoring and delivery system (funded by InnovateUK) and a two-year study into Virtual Humans for the MOD.  I frequently collaborate with Universities, and much of my work has been published in peer-reviewed papers, at conferences, and as book chapters.

​

I am based in Birmingham in the UK, but have worked remotely all over the world. 

​

In 2021, partly due to COVID, I reverted by business from being a small software development and solutions company to being my personal consultancy. My aim now is to make my 20+ years of experience in virtual technologies (be they reality, world or people related!) available to a wider range of organisations to help you better understand them and the potential they bring, avoid the pitfalls, and ensure that they can be used to maximise the success of your business or organisation.