Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Virtual characters in elearning

Thanks to Mark Oehlert for this heads up. Codebaby offers a virtual character solution to add interactive, animated characters to elearning materials. They are quite sophisticated. It might be worth a look - some of our clients may have an interest in a feature like this. I haven't been able to identify what breadth of range is available. So far, I have only encountered female characters, and they have all had very strong North American accents. I presumed male characters could also be created, but I had less confidence that different accents were on offer. A UK audience is likely to baulk at an American/Canadian character presenting their learning material - particularly in the public sector.

Running through their online seminar, I learned that the customer decides on the gender and design of the character and can either choose or supply the voice. This takes care of all the variables that bothered me. However, that leaves one fairly large obstacle. Distance. I wonder if there are similar offers available in the UK.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Karyn,

Thanks for your interest in CodeBaby.

After reading your comments, I realize that we're not doing a good job at all at explaining our models' flexibility in terms of language, accent, race, gender, etc. Thanks for this -- I will make an effort to get this info on the website.

So far as your comment regarding distance -- most of our customer base is located in cities and countries other than our own, and we regularly do business with companies based overseas. I haven't really found it to be much of a barrier, to be honest, though I can appreciate the importance of wanting to do business with someone a bit closer to home.

Anyway -- thanks again for your interested in CodeBaby.

Cheers,

Doug Johnson
Director of Marketing, CodeBaby
doug.johnson@codebaby.com
http://www.codebaby.com