Sounds, layouts and Custom Interactions – Airport Security

In our experience the multisensory nature of Immersive Sims greatly helps with learner engagement and to increase their feeling of immersion within the learning context. Where used well, it may also generate richer learning stimuli that learners can encode and bind into memory more elaborately and thus retrieve more easily.

A key element of this is sound. Ambient sound can be used to found the scene in reality, whether it is the noise of traffic or the hum of machines in a factory. It can also be used to stimulate different moods, be it excitement or calm or horror. Then we have scene specific sounds such as a telephone ringing and of course, human communication.

Having spent a lot of time recently in airports and the security checks I thought that this would be a good context in which to explore sounds. At the same time we can have a look at changing default layouts and building custom interactions.

Upcoming Expos

The launch of the Thinking Worlds authoring tool is but a few weeks away. I was over in Orlando last week showing the technology to folks at Defence Game Tech and the eLearning Guild annual gathering.

 

 

This week we are in London for Game Based Learning 2009 and next week the tool will be demonstrated in san Francisco at the Serious Game Summit – we have a presentation on Tuesday 24th of March in the afternoon. Come along to see Sims being built live and direct.

 

Look forward to catching up with people there.

paths and cameras

Torture! Good theme for a Serious Game?

Torture – a nice festive theme but bear with me, this is not a post about violence as such. A blog post by Clive Thompson demands provocatively Why We Need More Torture in Video Games – sit on the fence why don’t you Clive. Now Clive has not lost his mind in an Xmas fog, nor does he appear to be a sadist. Rather, he thinks entertainment based video games provide a powerful tool for experiencing and learning from complex and difficult situations. He rightly cites the convoluted debate that has accompanied torture and rendition practised under the banner of the War on Terror as evidence as an unresolved public debate; and examples of torture being used without restriction by CTU in the Series 24 as evidence of people not fully understanding the political, societal, moral and practical consequences of using and condoning torture. Can games be a medium through which to explore, experience, debate and learn about these consequences?

 

Pot and Kettle