Sealund’s Serious Games Blog

Your place or ours? With our growing library of 3D avatars and other virtual learning environment (VLE) objects, you can get the courses and games your learners love (and learn best from!), in the environments you need with the avatars your learners can relate to … faster and more cost-effectively than ever. Best of all, you have the flexibility to build these courses in-house with our licensed technology and library, or choose to have the Sealund teams create it for you.

Real and Relatable Avatars…

Our diverse family of avatars is growing all the time. We have more than 30 already and can develop any new personalities you need … quickly and efficiently.

The 3D Avatar library includes all types of:

• Individuals



• Families



• Work teams



• …and anything else you can imagine. From our library, we can create anybody you need – from astronauts to business professionals to to nurses to zoo-keepers.

Anywhere You Want Them

You can have your avatars in any gaming or virtual learning environment (VLE) you can imagine. With the Sealund Avatar Animation Technology (SAAT), you get instructional integrity, graphics design, 3D animations and virtual learning environments with leading-edge technology for deployment of eLearning using your existing computer equipment. A library of 3D environments, along with hundreds of 2D and 3D assets and props, are available with the SAAT for even more efficient development. “Anywhere” means more than just “in any environment you can imagine.” It means you can deliver the VLE experiences to your learners, wherever they are too. SAAT is an open architecture that lets you keep current with technology, including delivering eLearning applications converted to mlearning via mobile devices.

For more on the 3D VLE animations, the SAAT and the 30 new avatars, contact one of Sealund’s Sales Consultants today at consultants@sealund.com.

What do you think? Please share your comments.

Our clients form a very creative user community, and they love our Just PlayIt!™ game, so they’ve provided wonderful ideas to expand and improve it.

Just PlayIt!™ is a Jeopardy-like, Single Player, 3D Serious Games Engine that offers you a software tool to create 20 Questions, Answers and Feedback. In addition, you can customize your Serious Games by creating a custom name for each game, creating goals and learning objectives and creating up to 20 questions, answers, and feedback.

Just PlayIt!™ is instructionally designed with a test bank of questions that are randomly generated for assessment purposes. Just PlayIt!™ sends a completion notification to any SCORM-conformant LMS for tracking, recordkeeping and reporting.

The end result will be deploying multiple Serious Games for numerous topics all under your control. The Enterprise Wide License provides you with unlimited software licenses to use within your organization.

Just PlayIt!™’s new features include:

• The game screen now works best at a 1024×768 resolution.
• It can load questions from a tab-delimited file.
• It can add links to the feedback … very helpful for players to understand the details of what’s correct and what’s not.
• Questions now accept two responses as well as the four-response format.
• Correct answers now display extra “happy” animations – great for reinforcement.
• The game now requires Adobe’s Flash Player 9, so you can enjoy its new built in features.
• Players now see the questions displayed on the same screen where the avatars buzz in – a more intuitive placement.
• AI (artificial intelligence) avatars now wait only a couple of seconds to buzz in after a player answers a question incorrectly, a more real-life delay.



• Two load-speed versions of the game — quick load (super-fast with streaming graphics) and regular load (also faster than before). The quick load version, true to its name, loads very fast because it’s 100% streaming video. If your players just can’t wait to begin and don’t mind seeing some slight flickers in the graphics and some of the sounds being a bit off-synch as they play, this is the version for you. If your players are a bit more patient at the beginning, the regular load version still preloads all of the graphics and sounds, but it now loads faster than it did before.

As always, we’re grateful to our users for their wonderful suggestions and requests. These enhancements will make the game even more exciting and engaging for your players, and we’re pleased to respond to the needs of our valued clients.

What do you think? Please share your comments.

As more and more clients request avatars to appeal to their learners, our avatar library is growing rapidly. I look at it as the most diverse family under the rainbow.

What do you have more of?

Everything! Each avatar is configured with its own unique personality, and they’re all 3D. Our Sealund Avatar Animation Technology (SAAT) enables us to customize your avatars quickly and efficiently. Wow!

What’s behind the WOW factor? The SAAT!

The SAAT works like this:

• It provides instructional integrity, graphics design, 3D animations and virtual learning environments with leading-edge technology for deployment of eLearning using your existing computer equipment.
• We offer a license for the technology solution that includes avatars, animatable avatars, environments and assets/props.



• The avatars come with standardized setup and control options, prebuilt rigging and Mel Scripting so that animations can be transferred from one avatar to another. That reduces manual production time through more efficient animations.
• It allows you to change the scene or environment an avatar experiences depending on the user/learner’s response.



• It integrates 508 conformant and compliant needs for accessibility of content and gives all users/learners comparably engaging learning experiences.
• We can embed our avatars as Movie clips for Progressive streaming. Our avatars can also be integrated into DirectX and OpenGL environments by simple conversions.



• A library of 3D environments, along with several 2D and 3D assets/props, are available with the SAAT for even more efficient development.
• You get great flexibility because the SAAT is an open architecture that lets you keep current with technology, including delivering eLearning applications that can easily be converted to mLearning via mobile devices.



• You can make it your own! Our clients may license the SAAT and complete all the avatar animations and 3D environments in-house or use Sealund’s professional development services to customize and complete the project.

For more on the 30 new avatars and 3D VLE animations and the SAAT, contact one of our sales consultants today at sales@sealund.com.

What do you think? Please share your comments.

Our channel partners who offer Alaris Financial Literacy™ eLearning to their employees, customers and other business network members do well while doing good. They receive up to 50% of the revenue for each course taken, and the learners gain better control over their financial health.

VeteransPlus, Our Newest Channel Partner

VeteransPlus (VP) has become an Alaris Financial Literacy™ channel partner as part of the financial security element of their mission, “Serving Those Who Have Served Us,” by improving the quality of life for its military and veteran members, their families and communities. U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs employees are also VP members. For VP we customized the avatars Janet and JT, so VP members can relate more easily to them. You can click on Janet and JT here to see how their appearance and conversation have been customized to reflect military experience.

VP has its own customized website portal of Alaris Financial Literacy™ eLearning products, so that members, clients and employees of VP or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates can benefit from these resources.

We’re delighted that VP has joined its partner organization, the National Foundation for Debt Management (NFDM) in our family of channel partners. The NFDM, a 501(c)(3) educational organization providing in-person and telephone counseling on credit and debt management and housing (including home ownership, foreclosure prevention, and reverse mortgages), added eLearning to its services with the Alaris Financial Literacy™ curricula.

What does “offering” the eLearning mean?

That’s easy! You can host curriculum on your system, or Sealund can host it on ours. As part of your employee assistance program, for example, Alaris Financial Literacy™ eLearning can provide valuable skills to employees, and when employees feel more secure about their finances, they become more productive at work. A recent Harvard Business Review article, “Teach Workers About the Perils of Debt,” urged companies to offer exactly such resources.

If you’re interested, call our consultants at 800-434-8000 or email us at consultants@sealund.com for more information about this opportunity to help employees and customers increase their financial wisdom while your organization shares in the revenue stream.

What do you think? Please share your comments.