Interactive cooperative learning system based on virtual shared space: HyCLASS

A collaborative educational system has been designed that enables several students in distant locations to share a virtual three-dimensional space. It can be used to perform virtual experiments and carry out creative tasks. Students can dynamically create a new object and modify its properties. The system maintains a consistent status of the virtual space as seen by each student present in a room. An efficient communication method to maintain this consistency is proposed. Within the virtual space, the threedimensional materials are based on OMG-CORBA, a distributed object modeling architecture. Furthermore a method to create a new object and modify its properties is also introduced. Lastly, after developing and implementing the prototype system, we evaluate the various issues centering on the proposed methods. Keywords—CSCL, virtual reality, shared space, CORBA, multicast