Shelley

I should have been using this blog entry to report on the success of our launch party on Thursday. Unfortunately, due to a bereavement, we had to postpone at the last minute. It was a real blow because we have been working towards the launch for weeks.

Because we’re down on manpower this week as a result of events, not all of our final evaluation events will take place before next week. On the up side, our goal by the end of the next week is to have the model, collection and island all finished, some final evaluations completed and the rest arranged, and the finished version of the final report submitted to JISC.

Shelley

So near the end! We’re now working on the very final presentation elements – shaping the terrain of the island, working out where all the info panels will go etc. The island won’t yet look as we envisaged it but we can work on aesthetics and refinements in the coming months. The main point now is to get the basic experience in place for Thursday’s launch. In real life that also means rushing about shopping for prosecco and nibbles. Sorry Ben, not sure how we can get these to you via VR!

Shelley

This week Nic and I were both representing the project at different conferences. I was at the Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts conference in Belfast which was the venue for the wrap-up meeting and presentation of the JISC Enhancing Digital Resources projects. It was great to see what all the projects had achieved in the last year – they’re all very different but I think ours shaped up pretty well alongside them. Unfortunately, the nature of project work is that a lot of project teams will be broken up as the JISC money comes to an end. We are very lucky not to be in that position and to able to see the end of this month not as the end but just the end of the JISC phase of the project.

Nic, meanwhile, was at ALT-C, the national conference for learning technologists. He gave a paper about the learning activities in our model and got a very enthusiastic response. Presenting at ALT-C was one of our goals from the very beginning so it’s great that it had a positive outcome.

Shelley

Officially the last month of JISC funding and we’re rushing to finish everything for our informal ‘launch’ on 24 Sept (if you read this and you have an SL account, come to our site at 1pm on the 24th and join in). We’re cracking on with the bots – the tourist bots are circling (at rather unpredictable speeds as of yet) the atrium and we have written the dialogue for the Pompeian ghost bots. These two are integral to the learning activities and their dialogue helps children complete two learning activities, one about life in the household and one about the myths shown in the paintings.

Programming the bots to respond to choices made by the visitor is the complex part of the process. The bots work by reacting to key commands, such as ‘come’ but the problem is that if anybody in its earshot says that word as part of a sentence, they will obey that command rather than stay in the location and scenario they are supposed to.

The learning activities involve students working in teams with two avatars and are designed to test their communication, cooperation and map-reading skills as well as their historical knowledge. They need to gather information to answer questions on their worksheet. In order to complete the worksheet questions they will need to find and talk to the two Pompeian bots who will test them to see how much they have learned. If the students please the bots with their answers, they are rewarded with the answer to a question or a secret code word. If they fail, then the bot will send them away to find the answer in a specific part of the house.

Shelley

Last week the metadata, this week the draft final report. We’re more or less ready to submit this to JISC by the end of the bank holiday. The value of keeping this blog has come to be appreciated by both of us as we draw together everything we’ve achieved this year – it’s hard to believe we’ve accomplished so much, especially when we feel so time pressured to get everything ready for the end of the month. Inevitably, the court and island won’t be quite as finished and polished by the end of the month but it’s not far off and the ideas we’ve explored over the year are full of potential for further development.

The great thing about JISC is that they do ‘allow’ some failure. By which I don’t mean that it’s OK to make a complete hash of things, but that the template of the final report does allow reflection on lessons learned and unforeseen obstacles rather than just a self-congratulatory flag wave. This makes the compilation of the final report a much more useful experience, both for us and for its readers.

Shelley

I can’t believe it – all the metadata is done. What a good feeling!

Nothing more to add. This is easily enough for the week.

Shelley

I’ve had to face the inevitable this week: I must start writing the project final report for JISC. The amount and detail of info they require is not as bad as I feared but will mean that I’m taken away from helping finish the project before final evaluations in September. Frustrating. On the other hand, without JISC we wouldn’t have been able to do all this, so I guess it’s a small price to pay.

Shelley

My main job this week was scripting the dialogue for the tourist ‘bots. As reported in last week’s blog, these two bots (Isaac and Alva) will walk around the atrium, stopping off at key points to view paintings and rooms. They will also mimic known reactions to the site: Isaac gestures shock at the naked Venus and he also (provided Ale can programme him) will stumble up a step. Alva will pause to read her guidebook.

I’m really pleased with the dialogue – all of it is genuine: either extracts from the guidebooks or else comments from reviews (Alva, for instance, mostly speaks the words of Lady Eastlake, who reviewed the courts for the Quarterly Review March 1855. Isaac speaks the rather critical and (often hysterical) response of The Crystal Palace: An Essay, Descriptive & Critical and also quotes the Routledge Guide: Ten Courts of the Crystal Palace.

Shelley

We are now sure of what’s happening with the ‘bots so can go ahead and plan them with the help of Ale in IRLT. We’re having to strip back to basics because we have a strict budget but we’re happy with that – this is a pilot exercise so we’re looking to experiment rather than fully implement. Certainly the school student feedback suggests that this is the way to go.

The plan is to have 3 categories of robot avatar:

1. The welcome ‘bot. This female bot, in Victorian dress, will stand still at the entrance of the house but is programmed to turn to face new visitors and to give them information about the HUD and how to use it. She will do this by asking suggestions and offering visitors a series of responses so they can get the information they want.

2. The tourist ‘bots: these 2 Victorian characters, Alva and Isaac, will move on a predetermined route around the atrium of the house, pausing at 6 or so ‘hotspots’ where they will inspect a painting or a room. At these points they will speak to ecah other, either reading from the guidebook or passing comment on what they see. The point of these ‘bots is to ensure ongoing population of the mdoel and to help the visitor orientate himself – giving clues as to what should be looked at and demonstrating some Victorian responses to the site.

3. Roman character ‘bots: Claudia, a young Roman girl and Acheron, a rather ominous sounding slave cook will occupy the rear part of the house. They are divided from the Victorian characters in this way to reflect the idea of travelling into the past as the visitor gets deeper into the house experience. These ‘bots are also designed for the intended learning activities: visitors will be able to ask them questions and the ‘bots will have a variety of subjects they can talk about to help children find out more about Roman life.

Shelley

Good news. With lots of help from KVL, Nic has finished the HUD. The HUD is the device that delivers information to the visitor. It looks like an unobtrusive opaque tool box oin the corner of the screen with a few straightforward icons. The HUD knows where it is in the house so that when a visitor clicks on an object or the spinning disc in each room it will deliver relevant information. The information is personal, in that only that one visitor will see or hear the material, so other people won’t be disturbed. Information is delivered in two ways: audio or text and at three levels: one for general visitors or younger children, one for older students (with a particular eye to the GCSE Class. Civ. syllabus) and one for researchers. The HUD also delivers the relevant text from the official 1854 guidebook. The particularly useful thing about the HUD is that the visitor can skip between levels or ignore information at will. It’s pretty easy – even Gwendoline and I have managed to work it.

Shelley

In a welcome break from paper writing and presenting (welcome but illadvised – I’m supposed to be giving a paper in Oxford on Monday. Haven’t started yet….), we have spent the last couple of days judging the competition. You can find out more about the competition and the winners by visiting the ‘competition’ page on this site. The picture above is a close up from the winning group entry: Redland High’s collage of Pompeian life. It’s a great piece of work in its own right and presents a really interesting possibility for user generated content in our virtual world.

Thanks so much to everybody who took time to think about activities for the Model. We very much appreciated your efforts.

Shelley

We’re still in a pretty intensive dissemination stage this week. We gave a paper at the Electronic Visualizations in the Arts conference in London on Monday. It was a great experience and really useful to see the state of play in this field in the art, museum, heritage and education sector. Good to see that our project seemed to plug into lots of different current issues and very useful to meet people working on marketing projects very similar to ours (I particularly enjoyed talking to other Humanities academics about the difficulty of getting this kind of work recognised as ‘proper’ research).

As ever, we both ended up with loads of ideas about developing the project in the future. It’s really important that we keep these plans on hold and don’t lose sight of our immediate target – the delivery of the JISC phase of the project. I think we’ll have some really valuable findings for our final report.

Shelley

So the JISC Digitisation conference was our focus this week. It was a big event and some of the key note speakers were very inspiring. We were really disappointed with our presentation: we struggled with internet connection during the conference and were pushed for time, so we felt we rather undersold our project. It was good to attend another JISC event though to meet up with other project managers and to remind ourselves of how we can best fit JISC objectives.

And we did get a lead for possible future funding avenues for which we are very grateful.

Shelley

This week Nic and I have been busy on our different aspects of the project: the HUD and bots issues Nic’s been wrestling with are coming together nicely and suddenly everything is really accelerating.

I was out and about doing more evaluation with schools. I’d like to thank everybody I met at Chantry High School, Ipswich and St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol. At Ipswich, the students gave us loads of great ideas whilst Mrs Thorne told us how we could most integrate the model with the national curriculum by making sure we take on board key stage 3 PELTS objectives. Very exciting because if we can do this, Chantry may be able to use our model as an integrated part of their Humanities curriculum. This would be fantastic but needs a lot of planning towards.

Shelley

Ok, so it’s only Monday but I know that the biggest event of the week has already occurred so best to do this week’s entry right now. This afternoon Nic and I spent the afternoon with around 120 students from Bristol Grammar School. We showed them the model and talked about our plans for learning activities. The students gave us loads of useful feedback, with inventive ideas and thoughtful comments that will certainly help us plan the rest of the project. We collected data in two ways: quantitative data was collected on the spot by using an electronic voting system to register the students’ responses to key questions throughout the session  and we are very lucky to be able to gather more detailed qualitative feedback because we were allowed to set them homework to design an activity in the model and to reflect on its usefulness. We would like to thank Mrs Nesbit and the other staff at BGS so much for inviting us and many, many thanks to all the students for their excellent ideas and encouraging response.

Shelley

The model has really come on this week. And the strategies for presenting the metadata are shaping up rapidly. We’re going to try a few different things on a small scale so we can evaluate the options. Our main ideas are:

1. information boxes/audio clips opening when visitors click on an object

2. a HUD – a kind of tailored instruction manual that opens up in the space 

3. ‘bot avatars, which we have already discussed in our blog entries.

I continue to work on the metadata that will be delivered via these means.

Shelley

Crystal Palace Festival of Arts, June 6th 2009

On Saturday the Pompeian Court returned to the site of the Crystal Palace for one day only as part of the opening events of the Crystal Palace Festival of Arts. The photo above shows some visitors to our stall. Although the bad weather kept people away, I had a great day, met loads of people and gathered some very useful and supportive feedback as well as leads to images of the Court that I’ve never seen before.  I’d like to say thanks so much to people who took the time to say hello, especially the teachers from Woodside School and to John and Alastair for inviting us. Hopefully, next year we can be there with our completed project. I really hope we’ll be able to work further with everybody.

Shelley

Well, it looks like the architectural modelling is at last done – after grappling with the roof for some weeks. This was much more difficult than we’d anticipated. Although the focus of the model is the interior oif the Court, the roof has to work because, in Second Life, the avatars’ flying function means that many people’s first impressions of our house will be from the air.  As well as the technical and mathematical difficulties Nic had in fixing the roof firmly on the walls, we had the added difficulty that there aren’t any very clear images of the roof. Whilst it’s easy to guess the atrium part, which mimics Pompeian roofs quite closely, the central part defies the logic of ancient building entirely, making it harder to second guess what was going on.

Now that this is finished we can really speed on with adding the paintings, the real focus of the archive. Great news as we move into an evaluation phase with community groups and schools in the course of June.

Shelley

 What a relief – we got the EVA paper off in time. Took some excellent pics of the Court with an interesting juxtaposition of avatars in modern and Victorian dress.

Was going to relax a little but Nic just reminded me we’re supposed to have done our synopsis for the JISC Digital Content Conference 2009. Getting on to that now, Ben!

Shelley

Over the next couple of weeks, Nic and I will be a bit quiet: we have a big deadline on May 22 for submission of the paper we are giving at EVA 2009 in London. We had incredibly supportive reviews of our abstract from the organisers. They seem to be principally interested in the ways we are interwining Victorian and modern approaches to visualisation and in our methods of evaluating the project.

On that score, we have several school visits lined up in the next month or so. We’re particularly pleased to be working with our neighbours, Bristol Grammar School. We’ll be visiting them in a fortnight’s time to introduce the model and gather feedback on our ideas and output so far and then we’ll be back in September to get some final reaction to the finished product. Thanks so much to Judy Nesbit for organising this.

Shelley

Back from the States and out of the blog habit! It’s good to come back to see how much the model has developed. It’s looking really solid and the texture maps are at last starting to appear. Our plans for learning activities are also becoming more solid, as we clarify exactly what we want to/can do with the avatar ‘bots.

For me, though, the most exciting thing is the response to the competition that has finally been launched. It’s great to hear from teachers with whom I’ve worked in the past on other projects that school students are already devising exhibits and games for the model. We’re so grateful for all this input and there’s no doubt that this generated content will enhance the collection and, hopefully, increase the feeling of ownership and inclusion we want to engender in our users.

Nic

The main thing to report this week is the very interesting meeting I had with Silvana and Luis of Beta Technologies. The meeting was about exploring how technically feasible our ideas are for using bot technology within the project and to explore whether or not they would be able to help us implement them. We are essentially interested in three types of bots which are (a) a virtual tour guide, (b) animated Victorians bots as a backdrop and (c) chat bots, e.g. that welcome participants and hand them guidebooks and reveal information during game-like activities.

Both Luis and Silvana seemed very knowledgeable not only in the technical matters I was consulting them about but also relevant aspects of history. It seems our ideas for using bots are indeed technically possible and Luis and Silvana were very interested to work with us to implement them. However, it is apparent that there is a lot of work involved and we are likely to be restricted by the relatively small amount of funding we have available for external consultancy. When Shelley is back from the States, I will send a prioritised breakdown of what we need so they can cost each part separately and we can see what can be achieved. Time will also be a factor as they do not anticipate being able to have anything ready (i.e. fully tested) by August 2009. Saying that, some parts might be available earlier, e.g. bots dressed as Victorians standing about the model as a backdrop.

The meeting was also an interesting add-on to my experiences of last week’s workshop in the sense that it took place within Secondly Life using text-based communication. I found it quiet strange participating in a more formal meeting in Second Life. Communication seemed very slow and I often missed their messages when writing a long message of my own. I also made endless typos compared with Silvana and Luis who are obviously far more used to communicating in this way. Still, the meeting was both productive and very enjoyable.

Nic

Well, whilst Shelley is away in the States for three weeks it’s up to me to maintain the project blog. All efforts continue to be focused on developing the model. The architectural skin is now pretty much in place within 3ds Max and I am working to resolve some unexpected issues when importing it into Second Life. Work is also continuing to develop the textures maps which will contain the wall decoration and collection of images.

Thanks to a tip from Drew at KVL I made contact with Silvana and Luis from Beta Technologies (BT) who I am hoping will be able to advise us on the feasibility of our ideas for using bot technology – they may even be able to help us implement them within the virtual model. I have arranged a meeting in Second Life for the end of next week for a preliminary discussion.

The other important thing to document this week is that I ran a one-off workshop for staff of the University of Bristol on the current use and potential of virtual worlds within Higher Education. That event is relevant to our project because it made sense to design the workshop with a large amount of hands-on activity thus presenting a golden opportunity to conduct some preliminary research into the issues of managing a class in Second Life.

The approach was to take the participants through several carefully thought out activities and gather data through observation and a focus group style discussion afterwards (which doubled as a staff development session for the participants). The activities included a basic navigation task, a discussion activity that involved self-organisation into pairs then fours then sixes, a guided tour of the Crystal Palace island and a tour of other places in Second Life of educational interest which they were often able to explore more freely.

Several initial questions were answered, For example, it is possible for a group of participants new to Second Life to become competent enough with minimal training in using the Second Life software to effectively engage with a range of learning activities in a single session. I also identified many important practicalities of managing a class that are taken into a Second Life environment, e.g. in Second Life, beyond a range of 10 metres, a presenter’s text or voice instructions cannot be heard so instructions must be given in the real world and some other mechanism found if participants are not in the same real world room as the presenter. It was also interesting to gain insight into how the participants felt about interacting with each other in the virtual world and how their individual personalities and acceptable behaviour changed. This will all have bearing on how learning activities should be designed later in the project.

Shelley

This is my last post for a while as I have to go to the States for work for three weeks and it’s a good time to pause as the 6 month progress report is due today. The first half of the project has flown by but we’ve made real progress. We’ve found that the process of building and rendering has taken a lot longer than we thought but all the difficulties we’ve had in deciding best practice etc have definitely been worth it – the final product will be much more robust and interesting as a result. Nic has already started the decoration and he’ll be doing that while I’m away – who knows, he might even write a blog entry in my absence!!

In the meantime, thanks so much to everybody who has helped us so far. Have a good Easter break.

Shelley

Not much to report this week as its mostly been a case of consolidating the archive work for hand over to Nic and Sue while I’m away. But the highlight was definitely Ben from JISC who bravely volunteered to send his new avatar, Everest to meet us in SL. It was a great meeting – Everest was the first outside visitor and it was really useful chatting to him in the environment. Ben, of course, reads everything I write in this blog with the greatest of care so as a reward here’s a picture of Everest practicing his new SL dance moves with Gwendoline and Lucien at the end of the meeting.

Gwendoline and Lucien dancing with Everest

Shelley

This was the last archiving week in London for me but that is pretty dull stuff compared with the best achivement this week: the house appearing in Second Life for the first time. This means that we can now start decorating.

At the same time we discovered (and not in SL – I saw this on Tulse Hill Terry’s post in the Sydenham Town Forum) that we have a great way in to introducing the house to Second Life: there is already a whole Crystal Palace of a kind in SL. It’s been built in the spirit of the 1851 Hyde Park Exhibition as a place in which to gather displays of all the merchandise available in SL. You can read the plans for opening here:

http://primperfectblog.wordpress.com/2008/05/31/the-great-exhibition-comes-to-second-life/

This is a great idea in that it shows precisely the ways in which the Crystal Palace concept can be redelivered in virtual space in different ways. Personally, from an academic rather than commercial point of view, I think the CP Sydenham format that we’re following has great potential for bringing diverse disciplines under one roof (metaphorically and literally). As for the commercial side of things, I’m off to explore further this Hyde Park CP idea. The blog talks with enthusiasm about raking in revenue from the exhibitors – which was the BIG mistake the Crystal Palace Company made. Is a suspicious SL fire on the cards!

Shelley

A really great week, things are really coming together as we get towards the half way point. We had a really great board meeting with Richard Brawn this week, discussing the learning activities we had planned and how best to suit them to the constrictive objectives and time limits on exercises imposed by the National Curriculum. Nic came up with the term ‘Virtual Field Trip’ as a way of being able to use the model in a more expansive way inside school but with a bit more scope with which to explore the environment. As usual, loads of exciting ideas about where to go in the long term – but as ever, we need to remind ourselves that we have to deliver our JISC objectives, at least, by the end of the academic year.

‘The virtual field trip’ term is a tag we’re working with now because it has so many resonances. Nic and I have realised how building this model and exploring the collection through it has helped us realise why we started in the first place. We thought we were interested primarily in reconstruction and mapping differences between Victorian and modern techniques, but actually our interest is much more ontological: its about ways of inhabiting the past. This has helped us refocus our ieas for new projects we hope to launch through the model. The bots (scripted avatars) we have been thinking of placing in the model as orientation devices and information givers have assumed a new importance. Within the scope of this project, we can only make very limited use of them but it’s definitely something we’ll be exploring further.

And then on Friday I was back on site (lovely day to take a photo of the bit of grass near the bus station where the Pompeian Court once was) but the fair was in town – appropriately enough some ghost ride type thing was on the spot…. I was there to meet Melvyn Harrison from the Crystal Palace Foundation, and had a great morning chatting about the Palace and possible links for future projects. Then in the library all afternoon – have tracked about 2/3 of the panel paintings in the CP through the illustrations in the Real Museo Borbonico (1824-57): we’ll be using these as a basis for our own tracings for the walls. It’s a neat idea – keeps the 19thc dissemination technology and authenticity.

Shelley

Yesterday we met with Alastair Cameron of the Joseph Paxton Society. It was great sharing ideas with him and hearing about his own hopes for a Museum of the Microcosm on the site. We’re hoping to be part of events happening in the Park in May and June – excellent opportunities to show people what we’ve been up to and, however temporarily, to put the Pompeii Court back in place (shoved up against the bus station unfortunately!). Thanks so much, Alastair, for meeting us.

Our new plan for dealing with the mythological panels seems to be the most popular with all the team, marrying practicality and authenticity: we’re now basing our images on line drawings made in the 19thC (the chief way of disseminating knowledge of the motifs on Pompeian walls) and colouring them in on the basis of information from the guidebook and from photoes of the original frescoes, where they still exist.

Shelley

Diminishing returns at the archives in terms of finding new photoes of the Pompeian Court – I was at the Minet Library this week. But good to know that we must have tracked down most of the images now. I still only know of one picture that isn’t of the atrium area though. If anybody knows of any different ones, let me know.

One more week at the NAL tracking down bits and bobs in the various Crystal Palace journals and papers and then I’ll be focussing mainly on tracking down the paintings themselves. As the build progresses, we need to make sure we’re ready with the information. We’re still experimenting with ways of reproducing the pictures. I’m also thinking more about the way the text archive will be displayed – I like the idea of keeping the Victorian theme going with a scrap book setting for the review extracts.

I also had a great meeting with Ellie McGrath who works for the National Trust. Ellie is kindly advising us under the Heritage/Community aspect of our usergrops and she offered a very useful insight into how the heritage sector organises and plans its interpretative/learning activities. Most immediately, we need to decide what our key message is – the idea that we want everybody to take away from our Model, regardless of how much time or energy they spend there.

Shelley

A different archive this week – the Upper Norwood Library. There wasn’t really too much there (though the back issues of the Crystal Palace Foundation were pretty useful for catching up on recent history – and a Crystal Palace in Dallas that I hadn’t seen before. But the whole day became much more useful when I bumped (or rather was bumped into) John Greatrex, the man responsible for the re-erection of the small piece of CP ironwork on site. It was a very fortuitous meeting and I had a great afternoon, hearing about the history of getting things done and exchanging ideas about how models and reconstructions might work and especially on the role of leaving room for imagination so that visitors have a creative and not just didactic experience. There is going to be a Crystal Palace Festival this summer and I’m really hoping Nic and I will be there to show off our model. Thanks, John, for taking the time to chat.