The new app uses touchscreen technology and the portability and ease of use of the tablet computer to seamlessly blend together a rich tapestry of information that incorporates

• development plans
• floorplans
• property specifications
• CGI images
• photos
• video and 3d animation.

Without the restrictions of print formats, every aspect of property sales can be presented in the way that is most compelling and captivating. As well as interactively displaying text and images, the app can also play video tours and 3d flythroughs, creating an immersive and dramatic environment that brings an enthralling and exciting realism.

Linked to wall-mounted flat-screen displays, the app can turn a site office visit into a persuasive cinematic experience. Taking the technology one-step beyond, the app can also control a physical model, using remotely controlled lighting to highlight different aspects and elements of a complex multi-phase development.

Linked to easily updated web-based admin systems to ensure the latest updates are automatically downloaded at every use, development, availability and property details are fully searchable by a range of criteria – property type, size, location, price, number of bedrooms, etc.

At times the cars were actually driving towards each other – which prompted Mark to comment at the post-event gathering that it was a little concerning driving towards your colleague in an F1 car in Milton Keynes Centre, where the being sat mere inches from a rising and falling road surface means you can’t actually you can’t always see where the other car is!

Christian Horner also commented that seeing both the cars driving towards each other make his foot “bounce” a little more vigorously than normal!

A huge crowd packed into Central Milton Keynes to witness the celebrations as Red Bull Racing said “thank you” to Milton Keynes, the Red Bull staff and everyone who has helped them throughout 2011.

Virtual Viewing is a supplier of 3d modelling to Red Bull Racing and was delighted to be involved with the event. Here is a picture of our MD, Stewart Bailey, with other dignitaries from Milton Keynes including the Milton Keynes South MP, Iain Stewart, and Milton Keynes’ Mayor Alan Richards. Behind are Adrian Newey, Mark Webber, Sebastian Vettel, and Christian Horner.

We’re already hugely proud to have won the Socitm 2010 Local Government IT Excellence Award for Supplier Excellence for our collaboration with the London Borough of Redbridge on the Ilford Blueprint project, since when we’ve also Local Government Supplier of the Year and been listed as “best practice” by the Royal Town Planners Institute.

If you’d like to help us add another trophy to our mantelpiece, you can vote now at the Computer Weekly website – please note that voting finishes on November 25th.

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Limited places available

Thursday 6 October 2011
RIBA London
66 Portland Place
London W1B 1AD

Join us for a senior level conference discussing design, construction,
3d visualisation, future planning and key counter terrorism
initiatives for the built environment.

Having already been commissioned by the National Counter Terrorism Security Office (NaCTSO) to produce a 3d animated video to support the promotion of the Vulnerability Self-Assessment Tool (VSAT) – a project to assist owners, operators and those responsible for the security of crowded places in minimising their potential exposure to terrorist attacks – we will be joining a wide range of leading built environment and security organisations at the one-day Designing for Counter-Terrorism conference.

Driven by the Home Office, and organised in partnership with the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), Designing for Counter-Terrorism brings together government ministries and agencies, occupiers and built environment professionals to discover how new policy will affect their treatment of security and resilience.

The conference will explore a range of design issues in relation to counter terrorism, including:

• An overview of the key points in the government’s policy and guidance for safer places
• The benefits of incorporating security early on in the design process
• Why 3d city models can empower policy making
• Protective security: why and where it matters
• Technologies of resilience: Materials and structural design
• The final debate: “Is security at odds with the public space?

Stewart Bailey, Virtual Viewing’s MD, will deliver a presentation as part of the conference – Virtual Reality: Protection with visualisations – that will address a number of key issues where virtual reality and 3d City Modelling can be deployed to support a range of professions in assessing and reducing public risk:

• How can VR help us understand the risk in the real world?
• How scenario planning can be visualised and trained for
• Making CT guidance more accessible
• Multiple scenarios, multiple threats, one model

Download a copy of the Designing for Counter-Terrorism Conference Programme (PDF)

For information on the conference, or about Virtual Viewing’s 3d City Modelling services, please contact Yve Wallace by email or by telephone on 01908 933933.

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A totally new concept, 3DI encompasses the partnership between the insured, the broker and the underwriters.

Working together, 3DI and the client will provide Underwriters with all the information needed to comprehensively assess the risk in a hi-tech format that enables complex, detailed information to be conveyed quickly and easily. This innovative approach will reduce both the volume of documentation to be produced and the time that Underwriters require to interpret and process it.

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Although the potential range of applications is enormous (and certainly not restricted to mobile handsets), the initial mainstream impact is most likely to be felt in your hand or your pocket. Based on a smartphone’s ability to know its owner’s location, AR can – for example – overlay a 3d map of the area to show you the location of hotels, restaurants, public transport, cinemas, even particular shops that you’re most likely to be interested in.

By integrating with the phone’s GPS and sat-nav abilities, you can then be guided to exactly which one of those options most appeals – possibly even book or buy online, read reviews, access further details.

Their initial potential is being realised in city guides by existing publishers, but the potential for tourism, navigation, advertising, entertainment and many other industries is enormous.

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John has been involved for three years in developing Virtual Viewing’s 3d modelling work, and has helped refine our product range into something that is second to none in meeting development industry and public authority needs.

John has done an outstanding job juggling his Virtual Viewing duties with his other extensive interests, including growing an international consultancy practice that is involved in several Far East and Middle East projects. This workload has finally become too much and, as a result, John is now bowing out from his Virtual Viewing role.

We wish him well for the future, although we will see a bit of him as he hands over his existing responsibilities, and wish to say a big “thank you” for all his efforts, input and impact.

There are tried and tested methods that can help to varying degrees. Printed maps or written directions offer different levels of guidance and convenience; they can be saved as PDF files and downloaded from websites or sent as email attachments. But they give no visuals clues that help either drivers or pedestrians – and they often seriously struggle to explain car-parking arrangements. If you’ve ever asked for directions and heard “It’s hard to describe but …” or “there’s a sort of big blue thing on your left …”, you’ll appreciate the problem.

Sat-nav is a step forward (apart from new locations that have not yet been added to their maps, the difficulty of not necessarily having complete address details to type in and the occasional press horror story of people driving into streams), but it still renders the world in a simplified way that’s potentially highly confusing.

But there is an answer. 3d animations can include not just road maps, aural guidance and text instructions, they can illustrate complex road junctions, key landmarks – and the actual destination. (We’ve created one for ourselves – not just to show off, but to help people find our office without explaining its location relative to a supermarket: have a look in our 3d Showcase.) Parking options can be shown not just clearly and accurately but as the traveller will see actually them – as can demonstrations of how to use ticketing machines, locations of visitor parking bays and the like.

Playable on mobile phones, on YouTube, and on websites, they are accessible to nearly everyone and, unlike a map or sat-nav, can deliver a 3d presentation that attracts visitors as well as guides them.

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Traditional technical documentation has an unfortunate tendency to describe how to use software from the point of view of either the software or the people who wrote it. These aren’t usually people who need to add new sales brochures, announce special offers or the Christmas opening hours. They usually think in terms of database schemas or phrases like “enter an alphanumeric string of <80 characters; apply auto-truncation and disallow HTML tags”.

Although web developers that care about customer service and after-sales will normally acknowledge this, documentation needs to focus on the tasks, not the tool. To design your system well, this shared understanding should already be established: just as websites should help their visitors with their tasks – finding a specification, comparing a price, viewing a picture, finding contact details, so their administration systems should help companies and organisations with their tasks – adding a news story, promoting a special offer, updating a biography, making a new brochure aailable for download.

Accordingly, web site administator documentation needs to reflect your language and focus, and help you translate your tasks to the screen. If initial training is provided, refer to the documentation during the training so you can ask questions or make annotations. The role of documentation is ultimately to help you to do your job: the better you make sure that your developers understand the tasks that it involves, the better they will be able to help you.

That’s not wrong per se – you need to know which web pages are (and aren’t) being looked at, which email newsletters triggered the most clickthroughs – but it’s not the whole story. Like any kind of statistic, online traffic figures require interpretation.

Your Home Page may be getting hundreds of hits, but how many people look any further? Any web site will get visitors who quickly decide it’s not what they’re looking for, but if (for example) many of those visiting only one page are coming from search engines, do your keywords really reflect your offer  or are they just trying to snare as much traffic as possible? People buy – or enquire – about their real needs, not their vague ones.

Quality of traffic matters as much as quantity. You can’t force people to be like your offer, but you can make it as easy as possible to enquire, sign-up, buy or download details. (If your email campaign management system allows you to set triggers – for example, adding people who click specific links to be added to specific sub-lists or segments for future campaigns – think about how to use these to not only reflect your product segments, but also to match your contacts to them so that future campaigns are targeted at those already known to be most likely to be receptive.)

Look at figures, but look at the important ones – are people signing up for newsletters, requesting brochures, using the contact form, making purchases? It’s not volume that matters, its percentages – and the routes to them that make the difference.

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