Virtual Reality vs Real Virtuality: The Virtual Visitor Information Centre

The Lismore Visitor Information Centre (VIC) recently revamped their indoor model rainforest walk into a vibrant, interactive display, featuring murals.

I'm calling this Real Virtuality (RV). Real in that it's a physical installation; Virtual in that it's emulating a rainforest. (Note: Wikipedia uses the term differently.)

To enjoy the RV experience though visitors need to visit the Visitor Information Centre. This implies the visitor is already physically in the area, and they have to take time out of their visit to find out what to do during their visit. Normally you would not expect the purpose of a visit to be checking out the local Visitor information Centre; rather to walk through a real rainforest.

Instead of spending $120,000 to refurbish an RV, let's consider how this could be used to develop a Virtual Reality (VR) experience. This could include:

• Enriching Google Maps with local knowledge
• Creating StreetView panoramas into the local rainforests
• Adding web-mapping interactive content, such as historical or site-specific photos and local stories

This might've all been possible for less than $120,000, and encouraged an open-knowledge community-approach to tourism. Plus it could benefit the local population and students wherever they are, and possibly encourage them to access the real rainforest.

Advantages:

1. Openness - encourage local community to contribute and update content
2. Reachability - available to all visitors with an internet connection (including people in the VIC)
3. Cost - low on-going hosting fees (depending on services used; need to consider cost of authorised content changing)
4. Updatability - content can be easily modified

Disadvantages:

1. Copyright and privacy issues (of uploaded panoramas)
2. Limited viewing space (user-dependent mobile devices; but they can always ask for a real map at the VIC where large screen interactive displays are installed)

Maybe this could be a future direction. What would you want in a virtual Visitor Information Centre?

Change Management: The teacher becomes the student

After teaching high school students about computer hardware and programming languages for 20 years I am now practicing what I preached!

This week I started working as a Technical Support Officer in the Administrative Systems team of Southern Cross University. I'm learning about managing system environments, modifying and applying upgrades to corporate software, and providing advice and operational support to clients for Corporate Services applications and other related systems.

Conceptually I understand what is happening, but learning the nitty-gritty details will take time. Fortunately, one of my tasks is to update and develop documentation, so I have time to delve into the details. And to put the theory from the classroom into practice is very exciting! A highlight was a guided tour by one of the Senior IT Admins into the corporate data-centre.

Leaving the high school system has meant a change of environment, and work practice. It has also meant moving from blogED to blogspot; I assume my DEC account will be disabled, and at end-of-year when blogED is archived I will be unable to access the content (and drafts).

Getting content into blogger was not as easy as I expected. Text, image, and video data was fine, but using tables with CSS had specific quirks, requiring some fine-tuning. And tracking down some of the original content for some posts took some time.

In future I'm considering how to incorporate an audio edition (podcast) to blog posts; just need a convenient way to implement RSS. Things will continue to change ...

Q: To BlogED or Not To BlogED

A: Since 28-Aug-2010 I've been blogging using the service developed by my employer.

I've written about the value of teachers and students using the blogED service to display their work and start conversations, and this has motivated some of my students, and created discussion about appropriate online comments and privacy concerns.

However, for my personal use I've decided to try other providers, and after considering wordpress, my ISP, and some other choices, I'm going with blogger, mainly because it links into Google+.

The catalyst for this change was that the blogED service archives all blogs during the December-January vacation, and unless I have prior written consent from my principal, I can't create or edit any posts.

When I emailed the IT helpdesk about this a senior support analyst advised why this was necessary:

The “No blog creation” option is business decision.   The reason is that during the summer holidays the student rollover process is executed to include the new year students. As the process was completed last week the provisioning for all staff/students/groups to blogED has commenced this week. Until this process is complete, however, the new students/groups won’t be available to the staff to add to blogs.

I understand there are also (legal) privacy issues, where school staff are not allowed to communicate with the students during this school holiday period. We have, however, escalated the issue for you.

Email 11-Jan-2012 9:51AM

name withheld as analyst did not respond to invitation to discuss this issue on corporate micro-blogging service

BlogED must be a complex machine, trying to authenticate staff and students and allow permission rights. So to avoid that hassle, I'll start using blogger.

I guess I'll also transfer old posts here and back-date them. Apologies that I won't be able to republish comments, but I might include them at the bottom of the posts.