Gamification and Communities of Practice

July 23, 2013 Leave a comment

I was recently looking at the concept FavorTree (now discontinued unfortunately) which was a mobile gamification app designed to display the good work any person was doing within the neighbourhood.

FT

Lend out your ladder or teach someone how to unblock a drain and you would see your virtual ‘tree’ gaining fruit.

It immediately reminded me of a Community of Practice (CoP) called Fiery Spirits (http://vimeo.com/16024731) which connects people who have a shared interest in making a difference in rural communities.

I was wondering if anyone has combined Gamification within a CoP, in the case of Fiery Spirits, to better reach out to younger members of the community and promote the idea of being a good neighbour, sharing and learning together.

Filed under General

Unity: A simulation/games engine that can produce Film/TV animated work?

July 18, 2013 Leave a comment

For me it’s always been an issue that you can’t really use your real-time simulation/games engine to develop pre-render animation work. But then again they’ve never been made with that in mind.

I remember on a previous project we’d have to model in 3DS Max, then if we were simulating we’d move our designs onto Quest3D, or if we were doing some animation work, we’d use Poser.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could do all that in one tool!

Well the latest incarnation of Unity (v4) is purporting to do just that and it’s creators have produced a really nice piece of pre-render animation to back up their claim. I’ve included it below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdNdEuU30m4

Whilst I don’t think their quite their yet, the sample does show that sometime soon we can have a one stop shop for either TV/Film work as well as simulation/gaming.

Filed under Visualisation

Animated cartoon example

July 11, 2013 Leave a comment

I recently produced a quick sample of how one could use cartoon characters as part of my company’s internal courseware delivery. The approach wasn’t used, but I thought I’d provide a link to the sample in case anyone wanted to take a look.

Filed under Visualisation