Engaging, immersive next generation training.
Our training immerses, engages, enhances retention, and accelerates learning.
End-to-end immersive training that transforms the way you learn.
The right modality for your audience Whether you need a 3D serious game, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, or Web Based Training course, we can help you build a more engaging training experience.
We Design, Develop, and Deliver Immersive and Engaging 3D Training Experiences. 3D Serious Gaming or Simulations are a great way to help your users navigate complex decision making in which the environment is a factor. Simulations sharpen decision-making and performance skills, without exposing employees to risk or equipment to damage. Our Immersive Training solutions not only perform great on gaming hardware and unrestricted networks, but also behind restrictive firewalls running on modest PCs. They can also scale to thousands of distributed users.
Our team can help you design and develop web and mobile apps, that work flawlessly, and are beautifully designed. Let our branding experts create a curated experience for your audience that drives user acquisition. Our diverse skillset, backed by a rock-solid design and development team, will help you make your idea a reality. Apps don't live in isolation, they need multiple interfaces to meet the user where they switch across devices. From their phone to their tablet, PC, web browser, watch, and console, our team can help you design and build a flawless user experience.
While 3D Serious Games are a great way to immerse your users into a dynamic canvas, Mixed Reality provides the ultimate form of merging the user with the instruction. Whether you are using Virtual Reality to build a virtual world where the user is transported in order to enhance the realism of the experience, or you need to augment your existing environment via Augmented Reality, we can help you design, build, and deliver it.
Our award winning creative team not only creates immersive training experiences but has also created delightful experiences for a Fortune 500 media organization. We create dynamic media solutions that make your messages shine. If you can dream it, CreativeSims can create it, produce it, and deliver it. Utilizing the latest digital production and post production equipment and techniques, CreativeSims' highly qualified, production personnel can capture that "must have" shot while our digital designers and editors work their magic to provide the "wow-factor" for your media project.
Is a page turning PowerPoint bundled into a WBT enough for your users? Can WBTs be engaging? It all starts with engaging instruction that is presented through an immersive process. Yes, you read that correctly, 2D can be immersive as well. User engagement is driven by connecting the user with the content in a deeper fashion, and whether this happens in 3D or 2D the result is always the same... an engaged user is a productive learner.
We help you find ways in which your instruction can accelerate the development of expertise. Our award winning instructional design team can help you design immersive and engaging instruction. We utilize modern instructional design techniques such as content gamification, stealth assessments, and adaptive pathing techniques to better engage and accelerate learning, resulting in greater learner retention.
At our heart, we are a next generation technology company which uses technology to innovate in the training space. We are not just a consulting company, we don't just tell you what you need to do based on an ideal IT world that could never be a reality in your environment. We focus on helping you find the right mix of tech and services that will work for you, driven by a real-world understanding of your needs and constraints. Our team has helped clients from Insurance Companies, to Federal Government Agencies transform IT into a current generation organization, capable of delivering agile platforms that are able to respond to ever-changing requirements.
How do we build immersive training more efficiently than our competition? The answer is simple, a great team coupled with world class Development Operations automation. We can help your team modernize your development process while managing the increasing complexity inherit in today's technology landscape. Focus your team on creating great software rather than managing the development pipeline. Deliver features faster via more stable releases, which have faster recovery times. Ideate, develop, test, integrate, and deploy with confidence through a well-oiled DevOps pipeline which maximizes speed, functionality, and innovation.
CreativeSims was formed in order to bring our immersive training platform and next generation training solutions to the commercial market. With these innovative technologies comes an award winning, dedicated, and innovative team of industry veterans. Since our spin-off from Creative Veteran Productions, our team has propelled the original game management system into what is now FlashPoint IQ, a collection of technologies that helps us deliver immersive training solutions at a quarter of the cost. CreativeSims maintains a strong connection with Creative Veteran Productions through collaboration on existing commercial and government contracts... contracts that have delivered over 750,000 hours of immersive training to hundreds of thousands of users in both the government and commercial sectors.
It was a great pleasure working with your team. Gaming is the future of continuing education and you are on the cusp.
We appreciate the patience and expertise of everyone involved who have expertly guided us on this challenging, but always fun, journey into uncharted waters for us. Bravo Zulu!
A. Maldonado VHA EES SimLEARN Gaming Project Manager, Contract Officer Representative.
A new experience for me…very exciting to be a part of this! I believe we have an excellent, useful product and are working with a great group.
The DEMPS Patient Care Provider, Mental Health Scenario was one of the best training experiences I've had in my entire VA career! It really immersed me into an environment that reacted to how I moved and responded to the challenges!
We take care of the plumbing, so you can focus on the instruction.
FlashPoint IQ takes the common elements required for rich learning games and makes them available out of the box. Ready to plug into your game. It provides all the common building blocks of learning experiences out of the box, so your solution can just focus on plugging them into the instruction, rather than re-creating them. Whether you need a PC Based Training Simulation, Mobile App, Mixed Reality, or Web Based solution, FlashPoint IQ its management and delivery using its standards-based plug-and-play system. Any immersive training experience on any device can be connected.
75% Re-Use of common functions / 25% To make them fit perfectly with your training solution. A truly rich gameplay experience, at a quarter of the cost. FlashPoint IQ was developed to standardize common elements of immersive training to drive immersion and engagement, while reducing cost. Out of the box features such as Media Management, Learning tracking, State Management, Configuration System, and Analytics, to name a few, are pre-built and available to plug-in. Less time re-inventing the wheel, more time designing for your instruction.
Training Products can externalize all configuration in a standard way, making it easy to manage via a simple web interface. Need to change reference materials? Point and click your way into an easy update. Need to adjust how your training behaves? Adjust its control panel settings. Manage all your immersive training in a standard way using the same tools across your Training portfolio and delegate the administration of your training games in a granular fashion to your team.
Our Steam® like distribution system, the FlashPoint Game Browser, makes the deployment of immersive PC based training solutions a breeze. Through the Game Browser, you are able to publish your training to your end users seamlessly. It makes deployment a fully integrated, end-to-end experience.
A standards-based REST API makes the FlashPoint IQ platform accessible from any device and any game, not just games deployed through the Game Browser. Whether through web browsers using WebGL, PC, Mobile, Virtual or Augmented Reality, or Gaming Consoles, FlashPoint IQ can make any training solution a rich experience for your audience.
The out of the box functionality is great and gives you most of what you need. But what happens when it doesn't? The FlashPoint platform was built from the ground up to be pluggable. You can plug additional functionality to tell it to react to events from the user such as when a session ends, you can connect to existing systems, enable single sign on or even replace system functionality to change its behavior.
Introducing RIC! The Reconfigurable Immersive Character system by CreativeSims. RIC is a scalable avatar creator which allows the player to customize their avatar with a high degree of flexibility.
It includes over 30 physical attribute modifiers, in addition to a host of smart clothing and accessory options. RIC was built to bring AAA game-like avatar customization to the world of serious gaming, while meeting three unique challenges: modular flexibility, extreme optimization, and multiplatform targeting.
RIC is a key element in how we lower the cost of delivering our immersive training solutions. RIC allows us to create male and female avatars with wide-ranging characteristics to be used in our 3D immersive training experiences. By allowing the non-keystone characters to be created using RIC it converts weeks of work to create custom avatars into minutes.
RIC's flexibility allows us to create Non-Player Characters "NPCs" that are unique, and most importantly, are efficient. RIC's efficiency allows more NPCs to be placed in the environment, while still running effectively on lower spec devices.
RIC is seamlessly integrated into the FlashPoint IQ platform in order to save user character customizations "DNA" for the user as well as for NPCs. FlashPoint IQ allows users to carry their persona across training experiences which use the RIC character system.
The unexpectedness of being the primary role player in the scenario makes you think on your feet. Being deployed always expect the unexpected.
This was great training! I feel SO much more prepared to be a DEMPS volunteer now that I did this scenario.
The scenario helped me to start understanding some of the issues that need to be considered when being deployed.
This has been a great experience. This is presented as a nonthreatening environment to learn and to improve.
The feedback at the hot wash was the best. The actors were very realistic and helpful. This training has helped decrease my anxiety about doing a good job in the field. Thanks for offering this.
I really enjoy how it helped me know what to expect. I think we made an awesome team.
Great method to prepare for deployment!
This training was awesome and has helped to prepare me to become a DEMPS volunteer.
Training is realistic if you are not able to attend the live training.


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28 Nov 2007 : Column 123WH—continued
The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Ms Rosie Winterton): I congratulate the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Field) on securing a debate on this clearly important and topical subject, which he feels strongly about in terms of both the wider issues and his constituents. He touched in the later part of his speech on some of those wider issues but focused initially on some of the challenges of Heathrow.
We all recognise that Heathrow faces some real challenges—it is the busiest international airport in the world—but we also recognise that London and the wider UK rely heavily on good international links to support our economy. The hon. Gentleman set out many reasons why good air travel facilities at Heathrow are important for the economy and for the many people who use the airport for leisure and holidays. That is an important point.
The hon. Gentleman touched on some of the major challenges, particularly in respect of tackling capacity constraints in the face of increasing demand for air travel. In a sense, those challenges apply to all airports in the country, but particularly to Heathrow. We need to look at improving the service to passengers and, of course, to airlines as well. We also need to ensure that we are tackling the challenges, while meeting our climate change commitments and respecting the local environment around airports, particularly in respect of air quality and noise.
The hon. Gentleman was right to speak about the problems that face passengers at Heathrow. It was because of those problems that last week we published a set of proposals on how to improve the end-to-end journey experience, and we are now looking in more detail at how to tackle some of the issues that he raised. I shall touch on some of them a little later in my speech.
Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.
On resuming—
Frank Cook (in the Chair): We have reconvened with 12 minutes allocated for the debate remaining, which will take us to 4.43 pm.
28 Nov 2007 : Column 124WH
Ms Rosie Winterton: Before the sitting was suspended, the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster made a suggestion about airport capacity: that we should provide a new airport in the Thames estuary. I appreciate that developing Heathrow is not the only answer to our capacity problems, but the hon. Gentleman might recall that the construction of a new four-runway airport at Cliffe in north Kent was thoroughly considered and consulted on in the lead up to the 2003 White Paper, "The Future of Air Transport".
We recognised that an estuary airport would provide benefits in not overflying large populated areas. However, in view of the relative costs both for the airport and for surface access links, the time for construction and the financial viability of that option, the Government decided in favour of pursuing further development at existing airports, rather than building an entirely new one in the Thames Gateway.
Building capacity does not focus only on Heathrow. For example, the White Paper supported a new runway at Stansted, which would be the first new runway in the south-east for many decades. I can assure the hon. Gentleman that our commitment to the new runway at Stansted has not changed. It is important to remember that the White Paper also supported making better use of regional airports, such as Birmingham and Edinburgh. Growth in regional airports has a real part to play in satisfying overall demand for air services, as I know from the new regional airport in Doncaster, which is hugely popular with local people. Despite that, however, Heathrow is the UK's No. 1 and only hub airport, and we should not walk away from that even if there are problems.
Work is in hand to tackle many of those problems. Terminal 5 will open next March, and I am pleased that BAA plans to invest some £6.2 billion modernising Heathrow in the next 10 years. By 2012, Heathrow will have a total terminal capacity of around 90 million passengers—two out of three people will travel through terminals that are not yet open. Problems at immigration are being tackled. The hon. Gentleman mentioned the queues, and the Border and Immigration Agency is working with the Department and BAA to improve passenger flows.
On security, I am sure that the hon. Gentleman knows that the Secretary of State for Transport earlier this month set out a new industry framework to change the one-bag rule on hand luggage, without compromising security safeguards. Passengers should begin to benefit from that in early January.
The hon. Gentleman rightly drew attention to the frustration of long queues. Last week, the Civil Aviation Authority published its proposed package of price caps and incentives for Heathrow and Gatwick. Final price controls are not expected until March next year following a period of consultation, but the package will aim to incentivise BAA to deliver, in the CAA's words,
"genuine service quality improvements and to invest to raise the standard of service"
for both passengers and airlines.
The proposals contain an increased range of financial incentives for the airport operator, including targets for the percentage of passengers to be security processed within five and 10 minutes. As a further measure, the Secretary of State asked the CAA for its views on how
to improve the transparency of check-in times and other aspects of performance related to getting people through an airport.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned surface access. The Government's £16 billion funding deal for Crossrail is now in place and will provide a 30-minute link to the centre of London. From 2014, we will have an enhanced Piccadilly Line. The AirTrack scheme, if approved, would be a significant addition to Heathrow's rail links and provide direct services from terminal 5 to the south-west rail network via Staines.
Those measures should improve the passenger experience, both in getting passengers to the airport and inside the terminals, but the fact that demand for both departures and arrivals exceeds capacity on the current two runways remains an issue—the hon. Gentleman talked a great deal about it—which is why the Government are consulting on a third runway.
We need to be realistic about runway capacity if we are to protect Heathrow's international position. Our competitors have acted already: in contrast to Heathrow's two runways, Frankfurt has three, Paris four and Amsterdam five. Although Heathrow is full and turning away new services, all three of those competitors have at least 20 per cent. spare capacity, which provides them with resilience and allows them to grow.
In principle, the Government are in favour of a third runway, but our support—I hope the hon. Gentleman is reassured—depends on achieving a noise limit such that there would be no increase in the size of the area significantly affected by aircraft noise as measured by the 2002 57 dBA Leq noise contour. It also depends on establishing air quality limits, so that we can be confident of meeting European air quality limits around the airport, and on improving public transport to the airport. The hon. Gentleman has shown concern about those issues.
Mr. Mark Field: I mentioned that Paris has twice relocated its main airport in the past 30 years—obviously, relocation is an element of this issue—but one of the chief concerns of many residents of the Heathrow area is night flights. I totally appreciate, for the reasons I set out, that given the increasing power of India and China and countries in south-east Asia, there will be ever more demand for flights to come in at three, four or five o'clock in the morning. We need to encourage that, but I cannot understand how we could
do so with Heathrow as it is today or how it will be in future. That is one of the reasons why I am in favour of building an airport on the coast, so that we can cater for the flights that I mentioned, without disrupting the sleep of many millions of our fellow citizens.
Ms Winterton: I certainly take the hon. Gentleman's point about the importance of ensuring that those who live around the airport can get a decent night's sleep. Again, that is one reason why a third runway would be important in ensuring that the increased demand can be met, while not having to encroach on any of the night time activities.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned his constituents in Sipson, Harmondsworth and Stanwell Moor—
Mr. Field: I should mention that Sipson and Harmondsworth are in the constituency of the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) and Stanwell Moor is in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Mr. Wilshire). I just wanted to make the point that I have visited those areas around the airport on foot and have seen with my own eyes some of the concerns and some of the beauty and charm that those areas retain, particularly for people who have lived there for many generations.
Ms Winterton: I hope that it will give the hon. Gentleman some comfort to know that there will be the opportunity for the nice communities that he visited to respond the consultation and for the comments that I am sure that he will wish to make during the consultation to be taken into account as well.
The consultation also invites views on the introduction of mixed-mode operations as an interim measure ahead of a new runway, subject to the same local conditions as a third runway. Depending on the consultation's outcome, it will be for the airport operator to obtain the necessary consents in accordance with applicable planning rules and relevant statutory and other criteria. Final policy decisions on adding capacity at Heathrow will be taken at the earliest in summer 2008, in light of the results of the consultation.
This is not papering over the cracks. Our airports strategy is long term, looking ahead to the next 20 years or more, and I am confident that, with the significant investment going into Heathrow over the next few years and the proposals set out in the consultation on adding capacity at Heathrow, we can deliver a sustainable, customer-focused programme for Heathrow that supports a growing UK economy.
Dr. Gavin Strang (Edinburgh, East) (Lab): Mr. Cook, as you know, I have had the privilege of being a Member of this House for a good many years. Indeed, I was a Member of Parliament when HIV/AIDS first became an issue in this country. The world first became aware of AIDS at the beginning of the 1980s, when it was observed that young gay men in the US were dying from rare illnesses. The first documented case in the UK was in 1981. While scientists worked to piece together how the condition was caused, Governments had to work out how to respond to the new public health challenge.
My right hon. Friend the Minister of State, Department of Health, who is replying to this debate, will remember the huge campaigns mounted by the Government: the "Don't die of ignorance" leaflet distributed to every household in this country, the newspaper adverts and the public information film. Of course, there was such an outcry at the time because of the fact that to become infected was a death sentence. Infection with the HIV virus resulted within a short time in the breakdown in the human body's immunity to diseases, such as pneumonia. In Scotland in the 1980s, diagnosis with HIV was followed by death with AIDS within an average of two years.
The main sources of infection varied in different parts of the country. In some places, AIDS was very much a disease among the gay population. In other areas, HIV/AIDS was primarily a problem among injecting drug misusers. That was the situation in Edinburgh, where we had a major epidemic in the 1980s, predominantly among our injecting drug users. It is thought that a clampdown on the availability of needles led to an increase in needle-sharing, and that that in turn led to the explosion of HIV infection among Edinburgh's drug-taking population.
It was because of the scale of the problem in Edinburgh that I developed an interest in the subject and, under the private Member's Bill procedure, successfully introduced the AIDS (Control) Act 1987. That Act requires health authorities to publish reports annually, setting out the numbers diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, and to provide details of the work being done in their area on prevention, treatment and care. In the past year, the Government have indicated their intention to discontinue the central requirement of the Act. Health authorities would no longer be required to produce annual reports.
I understand that the epidemiological information provided by the reports is now provided centrally. However, without the reporting requirement in the 1987 Act, health authorities would no longer have to publish details of their work in the field of prevention, treatment and care. I am worried that that may reflect a wish—conscious or unconscious—on the part of the authorities to downplay the continuing incidence of HIV/AIDS as a major challenge in this country. I would be grateful if my right hon. Friend set out for me how health authorities are to be held to account for their HIV/AIDS work, if the reporting requirements of the AIDS (Control) Act are to be dropped.
The nature of the epidemic in the UK has changed over the decades. The numbers of new cases diagnosed declined into the 1990s. However, from 1995, increases in heterosexual and homosexual transmission in the
UK, alongside increased numbers of people infected abroad, led to a decade of steep rises. An estimated 7,800 people were newly diagnosed with HIV in the UK in 2006. The most common route of transmission is heterosexual sex abroad, while the highest number of new cases actually transmitted within the UK is among gay men.
The total annual number of new diagnoses shows signs of stabilising, which is welcome, but within the total there remain some disturbing trends. Levels of transmission among men who have sex with men remain high, there are worrying signs of increased transmission among drug users, and the number of people becoming infected through heterosexual sex in the UK is steadily climbing—from 232 in 2000 to 750 last year. It is wholly unsatisfactory that so many people are becoming infected and have to depend on antiretroviral therapy for the rest of their lives. We know how HIV is caused and how to prevent it from being transmitted, yet thousands of people every year still become infected with HIV in the UK.
Public knowledge of HIV and AIDS appears to have declined. While 91 per cent. of people in the UK knew that HIV was transmitted through unprotected sex in 2000, that figure fell to 79 per cent. by 2005. Our education system has a role to play here. HIV/AIDS is not a compulsory part of school education in any part of the United Kingdom. Ofsted reported this year that schools in England give insufficient emphasis to teaching about HIV/AIDS and that pupils appear less concerned about HIV/AIDS than in the past.
Funding is also key. While HIV prevention money in Scotland is still ring-fenced by the Scottish Executive, prevention funding in England and Wales can be spent at the discretion of the health authorities. Money that should be spent on HIV prevention is vulnerable to other pressures within the NHS. A survey conducted by the National AIDS Trust in 2006 indicates that, despite increasing rates of transmission, HIV prevention funding has at best stagnated and probably declined in real terms over the last decade. My right hon. Friend will be aware that there is considerable support for a return to some form of protected funding for HIV prevention work that is not at the mercy of other short-term budgetary needs. I urge her to consider those calls carefully. I would also be grateful if she could set out for me details of the implementation of the commitment in the 2004 "Choosing Health" White Paper to a £50 million mass sexual health awareness programme for young people.
Targeted action is also needed. One in 20 gay men in the UK is now living with HIV. The Health Protection Agency warns that prevention work among men who have sex with men is not succeeding adequately. In its annual report published last week, the HPA called for an assessment of the progress made within the NHS in commissioning soundly based services. The HPA also called for action to address the rising problem of heterosexual transmission within the UK. Such action would include targeted prevention activities alongside work to reduce stigma and discrimination within black ethnic minority communities, which are disproportionately affected.
Another aspect of prevention work is the uptake of post-exposure prophylaxis, or PEP. The number of people seeking PEP is far smaller than the number of people
who are at risk. Just over one in 100 men who responded to the 2005 gay men's sex survey had sought PEP, even though almost a third of respondents who had not tested positive had been at risk of infection. Clearly, awareness campaigns need to be continued. Furthermore, PEP is not always easy to obtain. I would be grateful for my right hon. Friend's observations on the extent to which the NHS is now meeting the chief medical officer's recommendations that all primary care trusts should make PEP available.
Of the 73,000 people in the UK estimated to be living with HIV, about a third are unaware of their status. That means that over 20,000 people in the UK are HIV positive but do not know it; many of them will assume that they are HIV negative. That level of unawareness has two implications. The first is for individuals' own health, as people who do not know that they are HIV positive are not getting the treatment that they need to keep them well. At least a quarter of HIV-related deaths are among people who are tested and diagnosed too late for effective treatment. The second implication is for the spread of HIV, because people who mistakenly believe themselves to be HIV negative may be less likely to take all the steps that they should to protect their partners.
There have been improvements in this area. We have routine opt-out screening for pregnant women, and everybody attending sexual health clinics should now be offered an HIV test on their first screening, and subsequently according to risk. The Health Protection Agency's report, "Testing Times", which was published last Friday, sets out the welcome increase in the number of people tested and the reduction in waiting times.
However, I am sure that my right hon. Friend will agree that there is a great deal of work still to be done in reducing the number of people who are unaware of their HIV positive status. Some 37 per cent. of HIV positive people visiting a genito-urinary medicine, or GUM, clinic still leave the clinic unaware that they have the virus. My right hon. Friend will be aware of calls for GUM clinic HIV tests to be conducted on an opt-out basis universally, and to be provided for every attendee every time they attend with a new condition.
There is considerable scope for non-HIV specialties to expand their contribution to HIV testing. The Minister will be aware of calls for routine HIV testing to be considered in certain relevant secondary care specialty centres such as TB clinics. Just last month, Scotland and England's chief medical and nursing officers wrote to all doctors and nurses seeking their help in getting more people diagnosed. As the Health Protection Agency notes:
"Perceived and real HIV-related stigma and discrimination by non-HIV specialists continues to be a major barrier to both the offer and uptake of HIV testing in wider healthcare services."
There is also a funding issue. The 2004 "Choosing Health" White Paper pledged an additional £300 million over three years to transform England's sexual health services. In a survey of primary care trusts and clinicians in 2006, just under two thirds indicated that all or part of their "Choosing Health" funds had been diverted from sexual health services. The professional body, the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV, advises that most of the "Choosing Health" funding has been diverted to alternative causes unrelated to sexual health, notably paying off PCT financial deficits.
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