Coventry University's Serious Games Institute has announced a partnership with Cisco and Giunti Labs to build a new learning environment that blends mobile learning with virtual worlds technologies, aiming to give the Institute's students a technology platform on which to build a digital model of the campus building. Ultimately, the goal is to have both the virtual building as well as the real one trigger location-based access to educational content.

The solution uses Cisco wireless location services to track real-world positions and movements integrated within the Giunti Labs Learn eXact learning content management system. The Giunti Labs software also allows repurposing of the digital learning content so that it can be used either in the virtual SGI or via any device connected to the Coventry University Cisco wired and wireless networks.

Giunti Labs, SGI and Cisco are also planning to start working on what they call ‘extended positioning’ - which means position detection systems that are interoperable among real and virtual copies of the facility. According to the companies, these systems will enable students who are visiting a place - either in the real world or online – to meet, despite being physically separated by thousands of miles -- in other words, a student in a virtual hall could connect to a student who is standing in the same hall in the real-world.

SGI says that Coventry University aims to create a "smart campus" by 2010 to attract more doctoral students, improve student and staff satisfaction, and grow its research income by 50 percent annually, among other objectives.

John Latham, pro vice-chancellor for business development at the university, said, "We set ourselves the goal of transforming Coventry University into a destination of choice for students and academics from around the world. Supported by the technology and expertise provided by Cisco and Giunti Labs, our SGI has a number of advanced virtual learning capabilities, such as drag-and-drop positioning of digital learning contents, three-dimensional hotspot positioning, and triggering and tracking of learning content by an avatar."

He continued, “We also have the tools and functionality for the creation, packaging and management of Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM)-compliant contents which can be contextualised and delivered to Windows Mobile 5 personal digital assistants within the SGI Cisco Wi-Fi network. And we can also reuse location based content also in other virtual worlds platforms, such as Forterra and Second Life.”