Knowledge Oasis Muscat announces its 4th Serious eGames Conference

Held under the patronage of HE Ali bin Masoud Al Sunaidy, Minister of Sports Affairs, this year's conference has an excellent mix of presenters who are all leading UK practitioners in serious games and virtual world applications.

Session one will focus on culture, heritage and tourism where Mike Gogan's Virtual Experience Company is dedicated to immersive 3D visualisation of historical sites such as Westminster Abbey. He will be joined by Graeme Duncan of Caspian Learning whose focus is on the development of immersive learning environments which help organisations create rich applications which encourage exploration. Also in this session will be Paul Turner of The Walk-in Web whose initial involvement in virtual worlds was to promote his home town of Atherstone's industrial heritage. Paul can talk about how local people can be engaged in preserving their heritage through these technologies.

David Burden of Daden Ltd kicks off session two which focuses on tourism. David's company is a world leader in the use of virtual worlds to create rich immersive experiences of towns and cities that are linked to geographical information systems like Google Earth. Joining David is Alex Jevremovic who is a talented 3D visualisation artist with a passion for creating high-resolution models of the City of Coventry for tourism and urban planning, whilst Paul Bhangal's company is involved in video applications that can be streamed over the internet. Paul will be talking about some of his company's work in China creating fly-throughs of new tourist developments.

After lunch, Jonnie Turpie of Maverick TV will relate his company's work to use digital media to promote the West Midland's brand internationally and Kam Memarzia of Playgen will demonstrate some of his company's video games which use national icons to engage players.

Kevin Corti of Pixelearning is an internationally accredited games based learning expert who can share his experience of how serious games technologies can promote towns, cities and nations - an issue that is obviously very much on Oman's agenda at the moment.

Mary Matthews of Blitz Games will close of the final session by describing her involvement as the originator of the Serious Games Institute concept and how it can contribute to building a stronger national identity and economic wealth.