Friday 4 September 2009

3D animations for mobile devices

Since the beginning of last year a Tibotec mobile project has been running. There are two partners in this project the Institute of Tropical Medicine and the esteemed Instituto de Medicina Tropical Alexander von Humboldt. The complete overview of the mobile learning project was given by my wonderful colleague Carlos, you can look at the presentation here if you like.

I wrote about the technical parts of the project a couple of months ago on how we would put all the pieces of the mobile learning puzzle together to get the most accessible mobile learning project on the rails using different media. In this mLearning project we are using iPhone's and Nokia N95 smartphones. We wanted to test both these high-end models, to see how the user experience differed between the two and how those different devices were received by the learners (all physicians located in and around the capital Lima in Peru).
We are at an exciting stage right now, as the first modules have been put together. These modules are all embedded in mobile Moodle and some of them use 3D animations. These 3D-animations are build to give the learners a better idea of the interpersonal dialogues that can happen between physician and patient and how to improve these interpersonal skills. The movie and the 3D animations were made by Luis Fucay and David Iglesias from the Humboldt institute.

These 3D-animations were made in iClone and afterwards converted to the needs and specifications of the mobile devices. My personal favorite converter is the AVS video converter.

To get an idea of 3D-animation results, you can look at the movie underneath, or download the m4v-file or the windows mobile movie. The movie is in Spanish.