Immersive Virtual Environments for University Education: Views from the Classroom

1. Introduction Education has long been touted as an important application area for immersive virtual environments (VEs). VEs can allow students to visualize and interact with complex three-dimensional (3D) structures, perform virtual " experiments, " view scenes with natural head and body movements, and experience environments that would be otherwise inaccessible because of distance (the surface of the Moon), scale (a complex molecule), or danger (a sunken ship). Many researchers have explored the use of VEs for education [1, 2], with some degree of success. However, few VE systems have been deployed for actual classroom use, and little is known about effective methods for employing VEs in real-world settings (the work of Johnson et al. is a notable exception [4]). In this paper, we describe three VE applications developed to teach university students concepts in the areas of computer graphics, building structures, and computer networking, and discuss our experience in using them as integral parts of appropriate classes at Virginia Tech. We differ from Johnson et al. in our focus on post-secondary education and in our use of VEs as tools within a traditional lecture-based class. We present our observations of what worked and what did not, and offer guidelines for others wishing to incorporate VEs into the classroom. 2. Educational VE applications In this section we describe the three VE tools developed for classroom use. All three systems use the same hardware, a portable VE system that we assembled from off-the-shelf components. We based our hardware choices on cost (educational institutions will not use VEs if they are overly expensive), robustness, and port-ability. The system consists of an A/V cart, a Windows 2000-based PC, a consumer-level head-mounted display (HMD), a three degree-of-freedom head tracker, a twelve-button input device, and an LCD projector. Each system also employs a similar user interface (UI). The head tracker is used to allow natural viewing of the scene. The 12-button device (actually a chord keyboard) is used for all other input to the system, with each button mapped to a specific function. A visual aid, which we call the interface representation (IR), shows the user which function is assigned to each button (see figure 1). Navigation is based on gaze-directed steering, and object selection and manipulation are also gaze-based, since only one tracker is available. 2.1. VENTS The Virtual Environment Normalizing Transformation System (VENTS) is an immersive VE application intended to teach computer graphics …