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

The Federal Virtual World Challenge was launched in August 2009 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 challenge is intended to explore the possibilities for using virtual worlds that may have not ever been considered by the U.S. Government. 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.

Entries were due by 15 November and were logically divided into four categories - Collaboration, Skill Building, Instruction and Visualisation and there has been both official judging by Federal staff and an open evaluation by members of the public. Public review continues to be available from the website.  Only three finalists have been chosen from each category from both the Government/Government Contractor and the Non-Government criteria. 

"It was clear that there were groups of developers who were pushing the envelope of training and analysis capabilities within virtual worlds.  Our hope was that the Federal Virtual World Challenge would expose those "pockets of excellence" and provide an opportunity to build relationships between these innovators and the Federal Government.  We were very pleased with the quality of the entries submitted in the inaugural year of this event and we believe that each of the finalists have demonstrated great innovation in the use of this emerging platform."  says Tami Griffith, the creator of the challenge. 

Within the Collaboration category Daden entered its Datascape data visualisation environment. Built on the Second Life® virtual world platform the centre-piece of Datascape is a 20m diameter virtual map showing Google™ Maps (or its OpenStreetMap  open-source equivalent). Just as on the web this map can be zoomed down to building level detail almost anywhere on the planet. But unlike the web version up to 50 users from across the globe can gather round or stand on the map and discuss what it is showing. Daden's web integration technology then allows data from a variety of web and real-world sources to be plotted on the map - ranging from BBC news feeds and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) earth-tremor data to GPS data and the real-time location of aircraft flying over Los Angeles Airport. Additional screens around the floor-map allow for video feeds, RSS and Twitter feeds, infographics, slideshows and even collaboratively edited documents and spreadsheets. 

David Burden, Daden MD said, "We initially created Datascape for the Federal Virtual World Consortium event in Washington DC last year. It brought together a variety of data visualisation techniques - and the impact of seeing them all in one place has been really powerful in showing how virtual worlds can be used as a data visualisation and data fusion environment. For instance following the Haiti earthquake we created a set of controls which allowed you to plot not only news stories about the earthquake and after-shock data from the USGS, but also to overlay photos and tweets being geo-tagged from users directly on the scene." 

Daden's second entry, again built around Second Life®, is PIVOTE. This is a training system for virtual worlds - which allows training exercises to be developed independent of the virtual world -  and be playable not only in a variety of virtual worlds but also on the web and even on mobile phones. PIVOTE was developed as a result of Daden's work on the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) project called PREVIEW with St George's Hospital, University of London. This project, which created a training system for paramedics at the Hospital won the Times Higher Education Award for Outstanding ICT (Information and Communications Technology) Initiative in 2009.  PIVOTE has been released as an open-source application and there are now users from Argentina to Canada, and across many European countries. Whilst initially developed for medical training PIVOTE has since been used for topics as varied as retail customer service and youth citizenship.  

For the Challenge Daden put together a simulation of a roadside improvised explosive device (IED) in Afghanistan. First the user has to navigate a remotely controlled robot through the debris to a secondary IED and disarm that. Then with the road clear the user - now playing the role of a medic - can walk down to the wrecked vehicle to treat the casualty. 

David continued, "The great advantage of PIVOTE is that it moves the core definition of the exercise out of the virtual world. This means that the same exercise can be experienced (at different levels of graphical detail) by users in different virtual worlds, or even those just with web or mobile phone access. This not only maximises access but also protects the institution's investment in the training, and allows tutors without detailed virtual world knowledge to maintain and even create the exercises." 

Daden is heading out to Orlando hoping to win the competition  - especially since up to $25,000 dollars is at stake. However, David concludes "For us the real win is just having our expertise recognised and being drawn to the attention of the U.S. (and other) Governments and agencies. We are already actively pursuing a number of contracts in the U.S., and hopefully our presence in Orlando will generate more real business for us regardless".