Serious Games

Pioneers of 3D eLearning Technology

Sunderland (UK), January 2009 - Gaming is no longer the preserve of adolescents, but has entered the corporate and education mainstream for web-based learning. Caspian Learning explains multiple applications of serious gaming and shows synergies that stem from working with Adobe Systems.




Caspian's core technology, Thinking Worlds™, is the only 3D games-based learning engine of its type in the world. It allows the building of immersive learning solutions for education, industry, and government. Thinking Worlds marries instructional design with 3D-games technology and utilizes Adobe Director and the Adobe Shockwave Player to bring this powerful combination to a wider audience.


"Interactive 3D gaming enables organizations to provide training that is motivational, learner centric, personalized, and contextualized. It also gives immediate feedback, allowing users to practice in a safe, failure-free environment", says Graeme Duncan, CEO at Caspian Learning.


Three elements make Caspian Learning's serious-games engine unique: It has learning science at its core; the platform enables technical novices to create complex, console-type applications without any coding or 3D expertise; and the Shockwave delivery platform is ubiquitous, allowing the company to transform the level of graphical and cognitive fidelity that can be delivered to learners via the web, even in secure environments.


"We chose Adobe solutions because of the secure, thin-client delivery capabilities and for the powerful deployment possibilities they offer", says Chris Brannigan, founder and chief creative officer at Caspian Learning.


In the media sector, Caspian Learning is working with companies to develop new educational programs on Thinking Worlds technology. According to Brannigan, companies recognize the need to deliver real immersion, high fidelity, and robust learning to learners, especially when they come from "generation Y".


In the corporate and adult-learning sector, organizations are leveraging Caspian Learning solutions for sales training, conflict management, meeting skills, and more. "If you want people to practice key behaviors that make or break performance results, we can provide a custom-built serious game in any contextual environment that will run in a hardware-agnostic setting", says Duncan.


Caspian Learning staff, its clients, and even students can rapidly author seemingly complex games inside the Thinking Worlds solution and translate and deploy them using Adobe Director and Adobe Shockwave Player. "The easy-to-use interface, the totally integrated framework, native 3D rendering, and the extensibility of Adobe Director with Xtras add up to a powerful authoring tool", says Duncan.


"Caspian Learning solutions are also structured to integrate with a wide variety of Learning Management Solutions (LMS). Data can be exported out of games and integrated within most LMS and LCMS systems. For example we have worked with Outstart and proven the ability to tag games in a SCORM-compliant way and feed data into Evolution."