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... accurate understanding of each other " is perspectives, feelings of success and self-esteem, and expectation of rewarding future interactions. ^i [Johnson 1983 ] 4. VR learning environments allow entirely new capabilities and experiences. This is a powerful context, in which you can control time, scale, and physical laws. Participants have unique capabilities, such as the ability to fly through the virtual world, to occupy any object as a virtual body, to observe the environment from many perspectives.
The ability to understand multiple perspectives is both a conceptual and a social skill; enabling children to practice this skill in ways we cannot achieve in the physical world may be an especially valuable attribute of VR. 'i We know the world in different ways, from different stances, and each of the ways in which we know it produces different structures or representations, or, indeed, "e realities'i... we become increasingly adept at seeing the same set of events from multiple perspectives or stances and at entertaining the results as, so to speak, alternative possible worlds. The child is less adept at achieving such multiple perspectives... There is every reason to insist that this capacity must be present in some workable form in order for the child to master understanding. ^i [Bruner 1986 ] VR provides a developmentally flexible, interdisciplinary learning environment.
A single interface provides teachers and trainers with an enormous variety and supply of virtual learning 'materials' that do not break or wear out. VR focuses our attention on the tasks and elements at hand, excluding extraneous information and reducing the distraction. The virtual environment allows safe experiences of distant or dangerous locations and processes. We can tele-exist in a nuclear reactor or under the sea, experiment with virtual chemistry and biology and inhabit macro- and micro-cosmic systems scaled for human participation. Creative expression is given a new medium, allowing students to instantiate their imaginations in a multi-sensory context, participating in experiential worlds of art, music, theater, and literature. Presentation skills are exercised in new ways; students can demonstrate what they learn and communicate their ideas through virtual experiences that can be shared with teachers, parents, and peers. 5.
VR learning environments can be tailored to individuals. Teachers can represent information in forms that are most compatible with a student " is particular learning style, selecting interactivity options that match student performance characteristics. Tools for movement and manipulation within the virtual world can be configured to the physical needs of the individual and the requirements of the task. In VR, we adopt a virtual body for group interaction.
What forms will children choose, and what will those choices tell us? Gender, age, social status, and physical attributes, and the cultural expectations associated with them, can be left behind when we enter a virtual world. By what criteria will will students learn to evaluate each other if physical appearance is arbitrary? Challenges To Be Met Using VR in schools and for training introduces both technical and cultural challenges. I consider cost, usability of software and interface devices, and fears about the technology. 1. Cost: Today, commercial VR systems that are sophisticated enough to offer complex models and diverse functionality are expensive relative to personal computers.
About a quarter of a million dollars will get you the basics for a very small network of worlds. However, increasingly powerful computer systems are becoming more affordable each year, and low-end VR environments are being developed in the United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Tomorrow, communications experts envision VR as a public utility with powerful centralized processing that allows anyone low-cost access to internationally networked virtual worlds. [Elias 1991 ] As a former teacher and administrator, I am well aware that inadequate teacher salaries and overcrowded classrooms take precedence over new technology in the minds of most educators. Serious funding for the implementation of VR in schools will be predicated on two things. First, we need conclusive demonstrations of educational effectiveness, measured by substantial learning and performance increases directly attributable to VR technology. Second, we need to identify sources of funding that do not call on the severely limited resources of educational institutions.
The burden of cost is appropriately assumed by those with the highest vested interest in a successful educational system. Not only families, schools and government are affected by inadequate education: business and industry spend $ 25 billion yearly to train / retrain their employees. 'i Learning has become the single most critical determinant of national economic competitiveness^i [Perelman 1990 ] The decreasing levels of competence of entering employees is motivating many corporations to invest in educational change. 'i The necessity of technology in schools is clear. However, bringing these critical tools to the classroom presents a challenge that must be met by the business community in partnership with government. ^i [Gardner 1990 ] 2. Usability: A crucial issue for integrating VR into classrooms is system usability -- by students of various ages, by teachers, and by curriculum developers. The following comments are not intended as product reviews but are my assessment of how well current VR tools work, based on the systems I'ive used to build virtual worlds and on my teaching experience in classrooms from kindergarten through college.
Designing virtual learning environments is substantially different from both traditional interface design [M. Bricken 1991 ] and traditional curriculum design. Because the whole learner is engaged in virtual activity, we must design at many levels, considering multi-modal representation of information, multiple methods of interaction, physiologically appropriate virtual contexts, and the choice and structure of the content to be explored. 2. 1. Modeling Software: Virtual worlds are presently created on the computer screen.
Worlds that run on commercially available systems are limited in size and complexity. The graphical models are simple, constrained on different systems to between 500 and 10, 000 polygons (sides of objects). We can locate four channels of sound in the world and link them to graphical objects. We can achieve somewhat more complex environments by linking worlds together, but each world is experienced separately.
The first step in designing a virtual world is to define it: what do you want to do there, how do you want to do it, what elements will you need to do it with, what is the context of the experience? We can model a world that includes an airplane like the VRX [M. Bricken 1990 ], that has interesting functionality and flies through a cubist terrain. But we can " it even come close to expanding this world to include the airport or the people in it, much less the luggage or vending machines or the printed pages of tickets. As it is, the VSX pushes system limits at 10, 000 polygons, and has a noticeably sluggish frame-rate. Designing useful worlds within present limitations is possible, but expanding these limits is prerequisite to building the complex environments that can be envisioned for education.
You can model virtual worlds with one of several 3 -D graphics design products. Modelling software varies widely in ease of use and capability. I'ive had the most experience with Swivel 3 -DTM, making worlds that run on the VPL RB 1 TM system. The maximum scale of Swivel worlds is approximately 12 'i square in physical space; if our virtual body was rendered at its real size, we would be immense giants in Virtual Seattle [M.
Bricken 1990 ], which is at maximum scale. We need modeling software with refined metrics that allow us to create large worlds, scaled to human proportion. In is easy to interact with objects in Swivel; even young children can learn how to get primitives on the screen, rotate and translate them, and link them together. But creating complex topology requires skill and patience. Accurately naming, aligning, and linking objects to form multiple-component objects requires looking at each intersection from several angles and distances, frequently unblinking, repositioning and relinking objects relative to each other. The VSX took me weeks to model, and there are still things I should change. (I'ive found that virtual worlds are never 'iron^i.
Changes and refinements continually suggest themselves: VR is a process...
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Research essay sample on Virtual Reality Learning Environments
