aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Virtual-Reality Based Immersive Education

The Chronicle on funding for a Project to Build Virtual Learning Platform Within Popular Online Worlds:

Virtual-reality software that researchers are developing exclusively for educational uses will be supported by funds from the Federation of American Scientists and the Kauffman Foundation, a group that promotes entrepreneurship, a Boston College instructor announced at a gathering on Saturday at Harvard University.

The instructor, Aaron E. Walsh, is leading the ambitious multimillion-dollar project to build a virtual-reality platform within commercial and nonprofit online games and other fantasy spaces. His goal is to promote online learning through interactive, three-dimensional graphics, Internet-based telephony, Web cameras, and other digital media.

The platform standards and best practices are being developed by an international consortium of colleges, research institutes, and companies that want to use virtuality for instruction, research, and training. [...]

The project builds on Mr. Walsh’s experience teaching Boston College students online in virtual spaces for three years… Mr. Walsh introduced the audience to the digital alter egos, or avatars, of some of his students as they traveled inside a three-dimensional model of an Egyptian tomb. An avatar of one student, standing in front of a digital jackal, explained that to ancient Egyptians the animal helped transport dead bodies to the underworld. The students have learned about some archaeological sites and tombs of Egypt through three-dimensional models developed by the Theban Mapping Project, based at the American University in Cairo. [...]

Also at the conference, Gene Koo, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, talked about how students at Emerson College and Boston residents were using Second Life to foster civic engagement. They’re using the virtual world to design real public spaces, including a park that will be located near Harvard’s campus expansion project in the Allston neighborhood and adjacent residential areas. And they recreated Boston’s subway system to provide tours of the city’s neighborhoods. The Boston Island in Second Life will be formally presented to the city’s mayor at an event Thursday.

Jeff Orkin, a researcher at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discussed an online game he created called the Restaurant Game. It seeks to mimic the experience of being in a real restaurant as either a waiter or a patron. Mr. Orkin collects and organizes huge amounts of data about people’s experiences in the game to develop automated responses to players’ remarks or questions. Mr. Orkin said that Immersive Education could help similar efforts that combine artificial intelligence and virtuality.