Planning the Virtual Runner Project

After sending an email to the Google Group of our Leeds Met Centre for Creative Technology about the successful bid to Connect Yorkshire for the Virtual Runner Project, I have received several responses:

• Duncan Mullier would be interested in working on software development of this project. He would participate in writing core components.
• Mark Dixon has expressed interest in the software development activities.
• Patrick Ingham has been suggested to be involved, because of his dual expertise in software development and computer graphics.
• L3 students Abraham Smith has been suggested by Duncan, and I spoke to him: he would be interested, but feels that this may be slightly above his expertise.

Furthermore, I met with Simon Thompson who needs funding for purchasing Apple IPhones for some related development activities. I will explore if this VR project can support his exploration of using IPhones for an initial component development.

Cancelled Talk at St.-Aidans High School

Weeks ago, Steve Wilkinson had asked me to deliver a talk at the St.-Aidans High School in Harrogate. So I prepared a talk about robotic driverless vehicles, which I thought would be interesting and entertaining to those high school students. Also Paul Emery agreed to give a talk there. But on this Thursday morning, the roads were full of snow, with ice underneath. I drove ok on the A61 towards north, and I would have made it in time to be at the school at 10:00. But we got a call from the school that this event was cancelled, because only a few students had made it to the school under these adverse weather conditions.

The talk will be given at another time, probably in the New Year. This meant that I could give my scheduled MSc lectures (Mobile Wireless Computing) here at Leeds Met without the cover that Steve Wilkinson had offered.

Faculty Leadership Team

At lunch time, the Innovation North Faculty Leadership Team met today in the Old School Board. After the usual reports from other meetings were done, I gave there a brief summary of the India project, and I told the news about winning the bid to Yorkshire Connect.

Won Bid!

I met Andrew Marran in the James Graham Building, and he told me the news that he had gotten a phone call from Lloyd, telling him that the panel had approved our proposal, and that we would receive the funding from Yorkshire Connect!

We would still wait for an official letter, before we post it officially on the web.

Bid Presentation to Yorkshire Connect: Virtual Runner Commercialisation

This Tuesday afternoon, Prof. Rod King, Andrew Marran, and myself gave a presentation to a panel from Yorkshire Connect for obtaining a grant for commercialisation of our joint TQEF developed "Virtual Runner" prototype. We pitched only the angle of developing this as a learning tool, as advised by panel member Lloyd Snellgrove (Director of Yorkshire Concept Proof of Concept Fund, Yorkshire Universities) who has spoken to Andrew. We figured that this would show a solid potential, as we already had an informal business contact through the textbook publisher.

We were able to cover our presentation in the allotted 10 minutes: 3 minutes for Rod to talk about the physiology, 2 minutes for me to cover the technology and show a presentation of our prototype, and 5 minutes for Andrew to cover the commercialisation and the market - the panel had asked to spend 5 minutes on this market topic.

We believe that the meeting went successful, as we noted that the panel was quite excited about our project.