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You
are here: Learning Through Virtual Reality
by Bill Winn
JoAnn is out on Puget Sound, about a quarter of a mile off the South end of Whidbey Island. She has an important job to do. A few days ago, a fisherman caught a strange fish near here. State Fisheries scientists identified it as Macrodont Horribilis, a predatory species never before seen in the Sound. Should it become established here, it would wreak havoc with the salmon fishery. Fortunately, the fish's preferences for current speed and water salinity are known. JoAnn's job, as a Fisheries field scientist, is to find where Macrodont is most likely to be, should others of the species be around. This is one place where the water conditions look right.
JoAnn descends to ten meters below the surface. She measures the salinity, current speed and direction and notes them. They are not quite what the fish likes. Maybe a bit deeper? She descends another ten meters. The current is picking up speed, making it hard for her to make measurements. So ... she reaches out, pushes a button and turns the current off!
Of course, JoAnn is not really in Puget Sound, nor looking for a real fish. Instead, she is in a computer-created "virtual world". Educators, virtual reality specialists and oceanographers, working at the University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Laboratory, in collaboration with scientists from the UW PRISM project, have built a complete three-dimensional "virtual world" that encompasses Puget Sound, from Admiralty Inlet to Tacoma. Visitors to Virtual Puget Sound can fly or swim anywhere they want. At certain points, they can do what JoAnn is doing - measure properties of the marine environment, stop time, choose whether the tide is high, low or somewhere in between, set currents to be shown as arrows, or release particles and see where the tide will take them.
Virtual Puget Sound is one of several projects around the country that is looking at how virtual reality (VR) can help students understand complex phenomena. The "find the fish" scenario is really a pretext to get students to figure out the relationships among salinity, current, the state of the tide and distance from river mouths and the open ocean. A second scenario, "where should Metro locate its new sewage treatment plant", focusses on how material moves through the Sound and is eventually flushed out to the Straits of Juan de Fuca. The evidence so far is that a visit to Virtual Puget Sound helps students develop accurate concepts about how the Sound works.
VR started out as an improvement to the way people interact with computers. Instead of using a keyboard and a mouse, users wear a helmet that completely encloses their eyes and ears, and hold some kind of tool. The helmet contains two small video screens, one for each eye. The virtual world is seen on these screens, stereoscopically. The movement of the head is tracked so that the computer can tell where the user is looking from moment to moment. As the direction of gaze changes, the computer redraws what appears inside the helmet, creating the illusion that the user is looking around, just as in the real world. The tool the user holds can have many functions. Mostly, it stands in for the user's hand an. By pointing or using some other gesture, the user moves around the virtual world. But it can also function as a tool for picking things up, operating buttons, levers and equipment, or for just about any purpose imaginable. With VR, computer users can get directly involved with their task rather than worrying about the non-intuitive interface most of us still use.
VR offers the same advantages to students. Virtual worlds built at George Mason University allow students to use their hands to directly manipulate source charges in electromagnetic fields, and atoms and bonds in organic molecules. Students can become a ball and experience, first hand, Newton's laws of motion. Children can use the Internet to log into the University of Illinois at Chicago's virtual garden, that they have to tend carefully in order top keep the plants alive. Visitors to Zoo Atlanta learn about gorilla behavior by watching the animals in their enclosure, and then, donning a VR helmet, by stepping "through the glass" into the enclosure and becoming a juvenile gorilla. Scientists at Georgia Institute of Technology have programmed the virtual gorillas to react appropriately to a sassy youngster! And back in Seattle, the Human Interface Technology Lab has used a virtual world to help students understand what will happen in Seattle if global warming goes unchecked.
"Augmented Reality" (AR) is a form of VR that is just appearing on the scene. This technology digitizes what someone is looking at, feeds it back immediately to the goggles they are wearing, and superimposes virtual objects onto the view of the real world. In this way, a dinosaur could walk into the classroom, or the characters in a book could come alive and act out the story you are reading. One application, under development at the University of Washington, will allow students to "pick up" a piece of a map, and to hold in their hands three-dimensional models of topography, subsurface structures, land cover, and the flow of water over the surface and under it. AR promises to be an excellent way to help students relate abstractions to real environments.
VR is not without its problems. First, it is still expensive to produce and use. There is almost no curricular content and content development is extremely labor intensive and costly. For now, it seems most likely that VR, in education, will only be cost-effective for remediation or enrichment. Also, it is much harder to produce highly realistic simulations in VR than it is to make simple, cartoon-like worlds. In many cases, this does not matter. VR is best used to give students experiences of things they cannot experience in the real world, like the bottom of Puget Sound or the inside of an atom. Since no-one knows what the inside of an atom looks like, it does not matter how "realistic" the virtual atom looks. Also, about 5% of students who use VR get a little queasy - about the same number who suffer motion sickness.
However, as the technology improves and we learn more about how people learn by interacting with virtual worlds, VR will be seen more frequently in our schools and colleges. It is unlikely that we will build virtual worlds with "holodeck" fidelity in our lifetimes. But people are working to create virtual touch and texture, virtual smell and virtual taste. Sounds in the environment can already be made to come from places that are stable relative to the user, regardless of how the head is turned. The quality of visual displays is increasing as their weight and cost come down. Educators have an uncanny ability to work creatively with new technologies. VR will be no exception.
Bill Winn is Professor of Education and Director of the Learning Center in the Human InterfaceTechnology Lab at the University of Washington. He teaches courses in Educational Technology and instructional theory. For several years, he has directed research projects intended to discover when virtual reality might, and might not, help students understand concepts and principles. He is currently working with oceanographers to develop learning environments that will help people learn about the ocean. Contact information: William Winn, 412 Miller, College of Education, Box 353600, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195, USA. billwinn@u.washington.edu
Copyright April 2001 New Horizons for Learning, all rights reserved.
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