The learner characteristics,features of desktop 3D virtual reality environments,and college chemistry instruction: A structural equation modeling analysis

We examined a model of the impact of a 3D desktop virtual reality environment on the learner characteristics (i.e. perceptual and psychological variables) that can enhance chemistry-related learning achievements in an introductory college chemistry class. The relationships between the 3D virtual reality features and the chemistry learning test as it relates to the selected perceptual (spatial orientation and usability) and psychological (self-efficacy and presence) variables were analyzed using the structural equation modeling approach. The results supported all the hypothesized relationships except one. Usability strongly mediated the relationship between 3D virtual reality features, spatial orientation, self-efficacy, and presence. Spatial orientation and self-efficacy had statistically significant, positive impact on the chemistry learning test. The results indicate that 3D virtual reality-based instruction is effective for enhancing students’ chemistry achievement. Overall, this study contributed a research model that can help increase the effectiveness of desktop virtual reality environments for enhancing spatial ability and science achievement. Moreover, this study provides insight to science educators, instructional designers, and multimedia developers who are interested in designing science-based instruction using instructional design principles.     

Learning chemistry with VirtualLabs@Uma: a customizable 3D platform for new experimental protocols

In general, students of laboratory courses such as chemistry or biology are not able to replicate at home an experiment of a previously studied class since they lack infrastructure and material. With the possibility of providing multimedia and virtual reality environments on the Web, different applications and virtual laboratories have been proposed. However, most of the existing tools are not flexible enough or are domain-oriented, not supporting the addition of new tailor-made experiments when needed. This paper introduces a new platform for providing a customizable Virtual Laboratory, VirtualLabs@UMa. This application was proposed at University of Madeira in order to provide students with a flexible 3D virtual laboratory and teachers with a platform that can be customized to new experimental protocols. Therefore, chemistry teachers are able to create their own experimental protocols and propose them to their students. Moreover, students can be followed accordingly having their learning needs and difficulties fulfilled. VirtualLabs@UMa is a solution for motivating students and proposing an added value for complementing laboratory courses.     

A multiuser 3D Web browsing system

The Virtual Realty Modeling Language sets an open-standard file format for designing 3D multimedia and shared virtual worlds on the Internet. VRML was originally designed to support the interaction of multiple participants in the World Wide Web environment, that is, to network virtual worlds via hyperlinks. The development of VRML has spurred broad research on distributed multiuser VR systems. We describe SharedWeb, a 3D Web browsing system that was designed and implemented to support interaction among clients in the existing Web environment. We begin by describing the methodologies and mechanisms used to achieve seamless integration with the Web environment, then we summarize the SharedWeb system implementation. We present some experimental results that show the effects of different frame rates and threshold values on system performance, and conclude with discussions of two virtual worlds currently supported by the system     

Using 3D sound as a navigational aid in virtual environments

As current virtual environments are less visually rich than real-world environments, careful consideration must be given to their design to ameliorate the lack of visual cues. One important design criterion in this respect is to make certain that adequate navigational cues are incorporated into complex virtual worlds. In this paper we show that adding 3D spatialized sound to a virtual environment can help people navigate through it. We conducted an experiment to determine if the incorporation of 3D sound (a) helps people find specific locations in the environment, and (b) influences the extent to which people acquire spatial knowledge about their environment. Our results show that the addition of 3D sound did reduce time taken to locate objects in a complex environment. However, the addition of sound did not increase the amount of spatial knowledge users were able to acquire. In fact, the addition of 3D auditory sound cues appears to suppress the development of overall spatial knowledge of the virtual environment.     

Real‐Time Analytic Antialiased Text for 3‐D Environments

Text is a crucial component of 3‐D environments and virtual worlds for user interfaces and wayfinding. Implementing text using standard antialiased texture mapping leads to blurry and illegible writing which hinders usability and navigation. While super‐sampling removes some of these artifacts, distracting artifacts can still impede legibility, especially for recent high‐resolution head‐mounted displays. We propose an analytic antialiasing technique that efficiently computes the coverage of text glyphs, over pixel footprints, designed to run at real‐time rates. It decomposes glyphs into piecewise‐biquadratics and trapezoids that can be quickly area‐integrated over a pixel footprint to provide crisp legible antialiased text, even when mapped onto an arbitrary surface in a 3‐D virtual environment.     

Multi-user mixed reality system ‘Gulliver’s World’: a case study on collaborative edutainment at the intersection of material and virtual worlds

This case study is about ‘Gulliver’s World’, a multi-user mixed reality environment that functions simultaneously as interactive edutainment platform and learning environment as well as flexible infrastructure for the expansion of mixed reality environments via innovations in technology and media art. As an exhibition project, the installation is characterized by a nonlinear exhibition concept that activates interaction between individual users and different modes of virtual reality as well as collaboration among the users themselves. At seven workstations, people of all age groups range along the Reality–Virtuality continuum while collaboratively creating 3D worlds. Results of these creation activities are interactive worlds at the nexus of theatre, digital film production and game environment. As a research project, ‘Gulliver’s World’ features multilevel infrastructure with exemplary content in which the latest insights and models to emerge from HCI research as well as concepts of mixed reality and virtual environments and their supporting technology are brought together and developed further.     

Pre-service teachers’ perspectives on using scenario-based virtual worlds in science education

This paper presents the findings of a study on the current knowledge and attitudes of pre-service teachers on the use of scenario-based multi-user virtual environments in science education. The 28 participants involved in the study were introduced to Virtual Singapura, a multi-user virtual environment, and completed an open-ended questionnaire. Data from the questionnaire indicated that gender and current computer game use were likely to affect the perceived benefits of using virtual worlds in a classroom setting. Behavior management was seen as being a constraining factor on a pre-service teacher’s willingness to use a virtual world in the future. Overall, the results of the study indicate that pre-service teachers as a result of their use of Virtual Singapura are both aware of virtual worlds and have a reasonable understanding of both their potential advantages and disadvantages within a classroom setting.     

Using 3D sound as a navigational aid in virtual environments

As current virtual environments are less visually rich than real-world environments, careful consideration must be given to their design to ameliorate the lack of visual cues. One important design criterion in this respect is to make certain that adequate navigational cues are incorporated into complex virtual worlds. In this paper we show that adding 3D spatialized sound to a virtual environment can help people navigate through it. We conducted an experiment to determine if the incorporation of 3D sound (a) helps people find specific locations in the environment, and (b) influences the extent to which people acquire spatial knowledge about their environment. Our results show that the addition of 3D sound did reduce time taken to locate objects in a complex environment. However, the addition of sound did not increase the amount of spatial knowledge users were able to acquire. In fact, the addition of 3D auditory sound cues appears to suppress the development of overall spatial knowledge of the virtual environment.     

Teaching your system to share

Creating multi-user virtual worlds is a relatively new challenge for developers of virtual reality applications. It is especially challenging to build networked VR systems based on inexpensive PC-based hardware, due to limitations in system software and inefficient networking hardware. This article explains how we created a multi-person shared virtual environment using DOS-based PCs. It also covers some of the design goals in creating a collaborative design tool for creating and modifying virtual buildings. Workroom is a general purpose simulation infrastructure that allows multiple participants to interact in unpredictable ways while minimizing simulation latency     

Small group behaviour experiments in the Coven project

The Collaborative Virtual Environments (Coven) project, a four-year European project launched in October 1995, designs and explores collaborative virtual environment (CVE) technology. It aims to investigate the feasibility of scalable CVE worlds through developing CVE systems and demonstrating prototype applications in a virtual travel rehearsal scenario. Our experiments in collaborative virtual environments investigated group behavior issues such as relationships between emergent leadership and computational resources, and the sense of presence and copresence among participants     

Navigational tools for desktop virtual environment interfaces

Desktop systems typically rely on a two-dimensional (2D) software interface and general purpose hardware (mouse, keyboard) for interaction with a three-dimensional (3D) virtual environment. These interfaces must provide all the functionality required to navigate through and interact with the virtual environment, yet research into the usability aspects of the tools presented on these software interfaces indicates that the majority of users experience some degree of frustration when using them to perform even relatively simple tasks. This paper begins with a study of usability issues for interfaces to virtual environments on desktop systems, and details a series of experiments performed to evaluate the usability of a number of navigational tools. Participants were tested on the time taken to complete a number of navigational tasks with a series of interfaces presenting different navigational tools. The tools presented were a speed control function, a you-are-here (YAH) map, a function enabling the user to mark and teleport to any location within the presented environment, and an undo function. Results indicate that the visual presentation of navigational aids improves navigation performance, in terms of the time taken to complete tasks, and also improves user satisfaction with the desktop system.     

基于OpenGL的虚拟化学实验系统的研究

传统的实验教学由于经费、场地等因素的限制而受到很大程度的影响.虚拟实验的提出为弥补传统实验的不足提供了一条有效的途径.对基于OpenGL的三维交互式虚拟化学实验系统进行了研究,分析了系统的结构和功能,并对实现技术进行了讨论.最后在VC 6.0环境下实现了一个中学化学虚拟实验系统--CVE.     

虚拟现实技术在化学实验教学中的应用研究

虚拟实验应用日益广泛,而支持虚拟实验的相关技术成为了研究热点。分析了虚拟化学实验及其在未来虚拟现实技术上的发展趋势,综述了U-nity3D技术、增强现实技术和Kinect体感交互技术的理论基础以及在虚拟化学实验中的应用与发展,以虚拟技术融合的方法为导向,仿真化学实验的实时环境,使虚拟实验简单化、直观化。展望了虚实融合技术在虚拟实验领域的应用前景。虚实融合技术有利于推动虚拟化学实验朝智能化发展,是虚拟实验改革的一个新起点。     

Guest Editors' Introduction: Intelligent Educational Systems of the Present and Future

Education in the 21st century faces an increasing number of challenges that require intelligent systems. The learning environments of today and tomorrow must handle distributed and dynamically changing content, a geographical dispersion of students and teachers, and generations of learners who spend hours a day interacting with multimillion-dollar multimedia environments. The new learning environments are moving beyond kindergarten through college classrooms to distance learning, lifelong education, and on-the-job training; they're entering the multifaceted universe of virtual worlds and ambient spaces. The articles in this special issue report novel, cutting-edge, intelligent learning environments. The systems not only have intelligent computational architectures but also are empirically tested on humans. Empirical research is of course essential to test system fidelity in delivering the intended pedagogy and to assess learning gains, usability, and learner satisfaction. This article is part of a special issue on intelligent educational systems.     

Mediating Media Studies – Stimulating critical awareness in a virtual environment

Second Life has become increasingly popular with educators and educational institutions, because of the educational possibilities it seems to offer. While there has been a lot of hype and academic publications about educational design or the theoretical framing of teaching in virtual environments, there have been few publications focussing on actual teaching and learning experiences of lecturers and students in Higher Education institutions. This article uses practical examples from an introductory course on Media studies taught at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University to demonstrate that even simple tasks in Second Life can be used to great effect if properly contextualised into the course being taught. High levels of technical skills, or extraordinary educational designs are less important to employing Second Life successfully in a Higher Education environment, than a proper evaluation of student learning outcomes, and teaching goals.     

From real cities to virtual worlds using an open modular architecture

The technologies for the Web and virtual worlds are currently converging, but although there are some efforts made to integrate them with each other, they typically rely on technologies foreign to most Web developers. In this paper, we present a new open architecture that combines several emerging and established technologies to provide convenient tools for developing virtual worlds directly in the Web. These technologies are easy to learn and understand by the Web community and allow for quick prototyping. Overall the modular architecture allows virtual worlds to be developed more quickly and more widely deployed. Additionally, we demonstrate that creating an adequate virtual environment can be an easy task when applying the principles of crowd-sourcing. We present an application that uses one of the largest available open data sources of geospatial information to bring 3D cities from the real world into the virtual environment.     

3D sound interactive environments for blind children problem solving skills

Audio-based virtual environments have been increasingly used to foster cognitive and learning skills. A number of studies have also highlighted that the use of technology can help learners to develop effective skills such as motivation and self-esteem. This study presents the design and usability of 3D interactive environments for children with visual disabilities to help them solve problems in Chilean geography and culture. We introduce AudioChile, a virtual environment that can be navigated through 3D sound to enhance spatiality and immersion throughout the environment. 3D sound is used to orientate, avoid obstacles, and identify the positions of various characters and objects within the environment. We have found during the usability evaluation that sound can be fundamental for attention and motivation purposes during interaction. Learners identified and clearly discriminated environmental sounds to solve everyday problems, spatial orientation, and laterality.     

Incidental memory and navigation in panoramic virtual reality for electronic commerce

Recently much effort has been dedicated to designing and implementing World Wide Web sites for virtual shopping and e-commerce. Despite this effort, relatively little empirical work has been done to determine the effectiveness with which different site designs sell products. We report three experiments in which participants were asked to search for products in various experimental e-commerce sites. Across the experiments participants were asked to search in either QTVR (QuickTime Virtual Reality), hypertext, or pictorially rich hypertext environments; they were then tested for their ability to recall the products seen and to recognize product locations. The experiments demonstrated that when using QTVR (Experiments 1, 2, and 3) or pictorial environments (Experiment 2), participants retained more information about products that were incidental to their goals. In two of the experiments it was shown that participants navigated more efficiently when using a QTVR environment. The costs and benefits of using 3D virtual environments for on-line shops are discussed. Actual or potential applications of this research include support for the development of e-commerce design guidelines.     

Exploration of architectural spaces by blind people using auditory virtual reality for the construction of spatial knowledge

Navigation within a closed environment requires analysis of a variety of acoustic cues, a task that is well developed in many visually impaired individuals, and for which sighted individuals rely almost entirely on visual information. For blind people, the act of creating cognitive maps for spaces, such as home or office buildings, can be a long process, for which the individual may repeat various paths numerous times. While this action is typically performed by the individual on-site, it is of some interest to investigate at which point this task can be performed off-site, at the individual's discretion. In short, is it possible for an individual to learn an architectural environment without being physically present? If so, such a system could prove beneficial for navigation preparation in new and unknown environments. The main goal of the present research can therefore be summarized as investigating the possibilities of assisting blind individuals in learning a spatial environment configuration through the listening of audio events and their interactions with these events within a virtual reality experience. A comparison of two types of learning through auditory exploration has been performed: in situ real displacement and active navigation in a virtual architecture. The virtual navigation rendered only acoustic information. Results for two groups of five participants showed that interactive exploration of virtual acoustic room simulations can provide sufficient information for the construction of coherent spatial mental maps, although some variations were found between the two environments tested in the experiments. Furthermore, the mental representation of the virtually navigated environments preserved topological and metric properties, as was found through actual navigation.