Interactive Training Blog

Ever wonder how to use someone else’s technology (legally) and apply it to your own project? Would you like to author an advanced simulation for the cost of traditional CBT or WBT? Now you can with Visual Purple technology! We are excited to introduce our suite of proven, proprietary and patented technologies.

For ten years we have put our blood, sweat and tears into developing business changing technologies that can transform your development processes and produce advanced simulations across three fronts: decision-based, embedded, or virtual world. The Visual Purple simulation suite provides unlimited possibilities. Just contact us for details.

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It seems as though whenever one mentions ‘virtual world’ the first thing that comes to mind is Second Life (SL). Admittedly, this is perhaps the most well known virtual world platform and certainly the largest ‘sandbox.’ Recently, Linden Lab (SL’s purveyor and overlord) released Q1 2009 performance data stating that SL users logged 124 million hours! So what are users doing? Most get caught up in creating there own avatar, utilizing the cheap economy of Linden dollars (L$) micro-currency, purchasing land, building things and enjoying 3D chat – think lots of socializing. Obviously, SL does appeal to the vast majority of early adopter virtual world users. Now, what if you are in the government or corporate sectors and like what virtual worlds offer? After a little digging most traditional or legacy organizations gin up concerns around the SL brand (the remnants of early ‘lawlessness” in SL and resulting bad press that just never seems to die).

So, in spite of a much more civil environment and continued strong use, the reservations never quite seem to go away, they just linger like a the Hong Kong haze…
- It’s not private and secure
-Too much variability and not enough control over the user, the user may roam freely in an open world environment
- No control on whom the user is able to talk to or how the avatar is set up
- Doesn’t play well with most enterprise firewalls

All these issues and others have hindered SL’s adoption by corporate/government. Linden recognizes this and is working with IBM and Intel to solve some of these issues. We hope to see some headway in ’09 as SL attempts to become an emerging platform standard for enterprise.

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By Rudy Helm, Quality Assurance Tech, Visual Purple, LLC

With respect to design, the following scenarios could be weighed.
-Is it narrative VO? Or
-Is it dramatic dialog?

If narrative in design, consider trying a condenser microphone, and be consistent with lip distance and use a pop-filter. Ensure that VO talent’s lips are about 2 inches from the pop filter screen, and attach the screen about 6 inches from the and measure your distances with a tape measure, write the measurements down, and enforce those measurements throughout the session. Try to do the session in one sitting (talent shouldn’t eat food while recording). If not possible to do one voice actor in one session, replicate the environment exactly and measure those distances! Realize that if doing the session with the same voice talent over a span of days, barometric pressure and any other environmental variances from one session to the next can work against you.

If the audio design is multi-voice talent drama/comedy, etc. Try using a high-quality lapel type mic in addition to a suspended room mic (the lapel microphones need to be placed equally in distance on each actor, from clothing point to lips). And with each voice actor, to ascertain a proper peak level, test-record the loudest passages of the dialog first. If the character in your drama needs to shout or raise her voice, start with testing those readings.

Let me relay to you an experience that a colleague shared with me. He recorded a character (let’s call her Sue) initially with his team’s mixer set to “where it was left at”. Then with their second character (call him Bob…he was brought in as a replacement for their previous ‘Bob’), the new Bob was clipping because the old Bob was so much louder. “So I had to find some knob to bring it down”, my colleague explained. “Then I had to have him repeat his exclamations at a lower volume to avoid clipping.”

So, the lesson is, always test-record the loudest sequences first. If you can achieve a good recording that doesn’t clip (distort) on the more intense passages, you are assured that all other passages from the same voices talent will not clip. And do not use the same mixing board levels for just any other voice talent. Test-record the loud passages from each separate talent. Sometimes dynamic compression can be deployed. Compression is better used during the session itself (to help stave off clipping issues and to mitigate the ‘proximity effect’, etc) but ultimately better avoided if there are not dramatic differences between normal passages and loud passages within the dialog.

Do not mix the two microphones (lapel plus room) to mono until all talent has been
recorded. Digital recording media is cheap. Make archives. Never overwrite originals! In
this scenario, your mono mix-down is not the original (the multi-track lapel plus room
formats are considered original takes). When mixing the finals to mono, mix such that the overhead microphone is barely noticeable. A good rule of thumb is to set such a level that you almost swear that track is not even ‘on’, yet if you were to mute the overhead track, you realize that you can tell the difference when only the lapel track is playing.

Surface reflections…
Even a desk (including for instance, if a table microphone stand is being used) can bounce the sound around. It’s a good idea to use a soft table pad and place something like a cloth napkin around the microphone pedestal. If the microphone location is suspended, rather than on a table, reflections can be problematic if it’s close enough to a wall (a wall corner, even worse). Another culprit can be simply a small-ish room. Reflections bounce off plaster, glass from mirrors and hanging photos/artwork as well. Oddly, a well insulated isolation booth can still be problematic, simply because it’s a small enclosure, and sound reflects back and forth even before it gets a chance to diffuse in the absorptive or dispersive materials of a small isolation booth.

A Colleague reported that he moved the microphone from in front of his VO talent’s mouth to above it. This technique is referred to as ‘off-axis’ and is a method to avoid direct sound, which can result in a mix of environment with the intended source, depending on the microphone and its configuration.

This may not have turned out to be a method that worked well for him because his team was recording with a big monitor outside the isolation booth. This was a 2-foot tall speaker, reportedly with high volume, sitting about five feet outside of the booth on the mixer desk next to the engineer.

My colleague pointed out that two qualified engineers didn’t have a problem with it, but he was still able to detect issues with the resulting recordings. Myself, I can only respond that if the sound booth provides near 100% isolation, I wouldn’t have a problem with it either. But with only 5 feet of separation, it would have to be one hell of an iso booth…though I guess it’s possible. To which my colleague adds that one can hear a raised voice outside the booth (and you don’t have to yell). Well, I replied to him that it sounds like the monitor speaker would easily approach the dB level of a ‘raised voice’.
Hmmm…To that my colleague agreed, positing that he was pretty sure that if the voice actor wasn’t wearing headphones, which said talent would be able to hear a playback on the speaker.

I think it stands to reason that if the voice talent is in fact able to hear a playback from the monitors, then that means the microphone can also hear the speaker playback. That means it gets mixed back into the microphone (especially if the microphone is off-axis as my colleague reports). The off-axis effect (usually) isn’t as worrisome on a condenser microphone as it is on a dynamic microphone, which typically is configured for unidirectional. On the other hand, condensers are (usually) more sensitive, and therefore keen to pick up external sources.

Let’s conclude with a comment on the end-user’s sound system…
Given the popularity of subwoofers and better-than-multimedia quality speaker systems attached to modern PCs, it probably is a reasonable consideration to roll off frequencies below 100 Hz on certain types of audio, especially VO and ambience loops, lest you are prepared for unnatural representation of those kinds of sounds. Obviously this approach might not be considered for high impact noises, such as car crashes, weapons, explosions, etc, where the subwoofers are best at their job.

By the way, I was happy to report that most of my friend’s sound issues have been resolved with his team’s proactive efforts to avert future problems at the recording level. And they have gone far at making their projects exude that professional sonic ‘sheen’.

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So, we posted a while back on our new Virtual World (Winning in Wireless: Year 1). I thought it was worth mentioning again as we put alot of blood, sweat and tears into the making of it.

What is Winning in Wireless: Year 1 you may ask?…Visual Purple partnered with BTS and took an existing Computer-Based Training (CBT) course and transmogrified it into a virtual world simulation. Not the whole enchilada but more than anticipated. Pretty cool, huh? The Visual Purple technologists have been working technology and creative approaches for months and months separating the wheat from the chaff until things really started to click. The virtual world sim depicts an eager, newly hired CEO of a wireless telecom company trying to find his way, complete with computer-generated voice for some of the non-player characters (NPC’s). No strings attached: no forms to fill out or marketing hurdles. Just click the download button and go.

Winning in Wireless: Year 1 does require a download, a browser-based experience is a cool option for deployment in the Enterprise space.

We have also compiled a short trailer showing the comparison of CBT to the virtual world transformation.

“- Link to”
YouTube Visual Purple Winning in Wireless Virtual World trailer

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By Ed Heinbockel, President and CEO, Visual Purple, LLC

We have an entertaining habit here at Visual Purple of diving down technology rabbit holes with a particular goal in mind and quickly finding ourselves looking squarely in the eyes of something far bigger, better and badder than anything we initially imagined. If we’re not careful, the proverbial technology tail would soon be wagging us. Looks like we may be living that dream today.

The ‘wouldn’t it be cool’ moment occurred some months back when we came to the realization that VWs demand avatars (NPCs) that behave in ways that would seem realistic and of utility. So we started down the path to achieve not Artificial Intelligence, but Behavioral Intelligence – or what we now choose to describe as Synthetic Intelligence. In future blogs we’ll break this down and explore the ‘why’ behind this naming convention as it implies much.

What about that tech rabbit hole, you ask? Oh yes, the rabbit hole. Think BIG databases. Think ‘smart’ databases. Think what that might do, distributed… got your attention now?
We’ll write more about this after our next patent filing. Stay tuned.

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By Marcus Cannon, Business Development & Project Manager, Visual Purple, LLC

Sometimes the bottom line really is the bottom line. In the midst of an economic downturn executives are leery of spending on anything that doesn’t seem likely to increase profit. Charles Cooper echoed this sentiment recently closing with the advice that “telling the boss that you’re saving the environment in the process is not likely to be the clincher. Ever.” Similarly, JP Morgan’s managing director Mike Dorsey recently put it as bluntly as possible: “Saving the world is not a substitute for being financially successful.”

Luckily, using virtual world technology in order to offset travel costs is cleantech that makes sense. More and more companies are recognizing that consistently high fuel costs, lodging costs, per diem costs, and the opportunity cost of having the workforce away from the workplace doesn’t make that much sense. There may always be some number of events that companies will want live, but that number is dwindling. As virtual world technology improves, distributed workforces are more and more able to effectively use VWs as effective mediums for training, project meetings, team-building exercises, and conferences. Despite the traditional misconception—employees won’t pay attention because they’re sitting in their offices on their computers—many firms report that employees have higher immersion and participation levels while attending via a VW. These employees are not jet-lagged, they’re not sitting in a stuffy (or frigidly cold) conference room with dim lighting, and they’re able to bring the full resources of their native work environment to bear on problems and challenges being collaboratively discussed in the VW.

In a bear market prospects for cleantech as a feel-good investment are indeed bare. But when a minimal investment can offset massive costs and contribute to a company’s environmentally friendly image, that’s an investment executives are likely to embrace.

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By Rudy Helm, Quality Assurance Tech, Visual Purple, LLC

I recall once upon a time a colleague described to me that on his PC, he was hearing within the recordings of a project’s Voice-Over talent (supporting an animated character) where she persistently pops her p’s – and my colleague began to wonder if he was crazy. He recognized that if he turned down his subwoofer, he didn’t hear it. So he asked me if that was something that could easily be fixed in their processing? He added that he didn’t hear that kind of problem in any other audio.

I answered to that, “EZ fix?”
Well… If she was the only popper, a couple things may have happened:
-She wasn’t recorded with the same circumstances as other VO talent; or
-She got too close to the microphone sometimes. A pop filter should have been used in all cases (this is a physical device which costs about 25 dollars….hangs on the microphone stand). But in software, Sonic Foundry (now Sony) has a nice preset which minimizes plosives (pops) or sibilance (“ess” sounds). Sometimes using both the physical device and the software filter in tandem can be helpful.

It is also a possibility that the software Equalization settings (EQ) in my colleague’s PC sound system were incorrectly configured for the situation. Many of today’s software drivers include a wide palette of listening-environment presets. Available parameters generally can be further tweaked by the end user. Consider that if a preset is configured to give an extra bass boost, one could notice artifacts in audio within the low-end frequency bands where plosives reside. But I didn’t believe this was the case at hand because my colleague didn’t notice artifacts in any but the recordings of this one specific VO talent.

Anyway, when you’re stuck in a situation where VO can’t be re-recorded, EQ’ing after the fact may be the last resort you have to take to arrive at a solution. In the case of the plosive p’s popping, running the digitized VO clips through a software editor with batch editing EQ capabilities might work out satisfactorily and may even save time.

When ‘fuzziness’ quality in VO can happen:
-when lips are too close to the microphone. This is when the proximity effect is most noticeable. (The proximity effect is that heavy, low frequency characteristic that you get when a microphone records a sound emitter very close to the microphones diaphragm. Record a voice too closely and you may have to use EQ later to thin out the heaviness). Or,
-when a windscreen was utilized, where a pop-filter should have been used instead.
Windscreens also tend to filter away some of the high end. And there is yet another factor that may need to be considered… The choice of microphone.

The proactive solution for any particular recording room is to rent several microphones of various brands and/or diaphragm sizes (condensers, dynamics, and lapels) and test-record VO talent, male and female (same test-script on each voice, each mic). Then choose to use (buy or rent) the microphone(s) that seems work best with available talent.

Even with cases like this, there are shades of gray. Nothing, it seems, is simply black or white. My colleague told me that his team’s recording department reported to him that the mic-to-talent distance was consistent. Well, the caveat about this might be, was the distance the same for all voice talent? If any one specific voice talent was involved, her consistency (regarding distance) would be the only aspect that matter…but managing a larger pool of voice talent is another thing. To be continued later in a Part 2 blog post….

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With all the buzz around virtual worlds today, one must wonder what the benefits of virtual world training really are…

Well, I decided to outline a few:
-Overall richness of learning experience;
-High engagement: Pull vs. Push (user has control to “pull” information; not endure “push” as found in standard CBT);
-Lower cost to build: New production paradigm and business model permissive of lower costs and rapid updating…lower overall costs than traditional CBT in large projects that scale;
-High business value and real-world context;
-Learner-centric;
-High usability quotient…full learner immersion;
-Realistic avatar representations; and,
-Very sticky experience: unlike Vegas, what goes on in a Virtual World doesn’t stay in a Virtual World!

As you can see I am a strong proponent in the utilization of virtual worlds for training within the government and corporate sectors and the above are only the tip of the iceberg for training within an immersive, virtual world environment.

So how can I learn more? Good question. Visit our website, play Winning in Wireless:Year 1, or contact us to see if virtual world training is the right fit for your organization.

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Charting a Path with FloChart™

Our proprietary FloChart™ system is an advanced middleware application that empowers non-programmers to build complex simulations. This concept is a cornerstone of Visual Purple’s production philosophy.

From a learning and engagement perspective FloChart™ is used to create a flexible roadmap for our simulations. This roadmap allows content experts to create learning and training simulations that are highly realistic and engaging. By allowing the content experts (Instructional Designers & SMEs) to become the “programmers,” FloChart™ puts the real experts—not computer scientists—in control. FloChart™ gives these experts the tools they need to create simulations that are complex, adapt to user behavior, track users’ actions and inactions, provide mentoring and feedback, and synch with Learning Management Systems. This flexibility results in highly effective training and learning experiences, all the while honoring diverse learning styles and incorporating the magic ingredient: Story!

Technically speaking, FloChart™ is a fifth generation authoring language used for advanced modeling and design. This capability enables skilled technicians to rapidly create realistic virtual worlds. FloChart™ is a perfect tool for creating intelligent Non Player Characters (NPCs) and authentic experiences. Using database, stochastic or neural net-like drivers to animate the simulation experience FloChart™ provides highly flexible behavioral intelligence for our simulations. The FloChart™ approach and authoring language have even been used to uncover unknown and unforeseen relationships between discretely modeled systems—a capability valued by clients looking to gain a competitive edge in either training or systems analysis.

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So, we are finally LIVE with the Winning in Wireless:Year 1! What is this virtual world you may ask?…Visual Purple partnered with BTS and took an existing Computer-Based Training (CBT) course and transmogrified it into a virtual world simulation. Not the whole enchilada but more than anticipated. Pretty cool, huh? The Visual Purple technologists have been working technology and creative approaches for months and months separating the wheat from the chaff until things really started to click. The virtual world sim depicts an eager, newly hired CEO of a wireless telecom company trying to find his way, complete with computer-generated voice for some of the non-player characters (NPC’s). No strings attached: no forms to fill out or marketing hurdles. Just click the download button and go.

Winning in Wireless: Year 1 does require a download, a browser-based experience is a cool option for deployment in the Enterprise space.

We have also compiled a short trailer showing the comparison of CBT to the virtual world transformation.

“- Link to”
YouTube Visual Purple Winning in Wireless Virtual World trailer

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