The Virtual Reality Roving Vehicle Project.
1995; 1105 Media; Volume: 23; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0192-592X
Autores Tópico(s)Teaching and Learning Programming
ResumoBetween November 1994 and June 1995, almost 3,000 students in grades four through 12 throughout the state of Washington experienced Virtual Reality (VR) in their classrooms. Another 365 built their own Virtual Worlds. The Virtual Reality Roving Vehicle project (VRRV, pronounced verve) was funded by the US WEST Foundation to bring VR equipment and experiences to children in all areas of the state. The project was based at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HITL), part of the Washington Technology Center on the University of Washington campus in Seattle. The VRRV team consisted of software designers and engineers from HITL, Educational Technology faculty and students from the College of Education, a cadre of Van Techs who did everything from loading and driving vans to giving presentations and demonstrations in schools, plus students and teachers in close to 70 schools. Here, I describe what we did, how we did it, what we learned and what we plan to do next. What We Did Our goals were ambitious. First, we wanted as many children as possible to experience immersive VR and to discuss with them its potential and limitations. Popular media has hyped VR to excess and we felt that youngsters need to understand that VR is a technology that still has to mature before it is used widely. Second, we wanted to get our high-end workstations and software out of the lab and into children's hands, confident that they would use them effectively and imaginatively. And third, we wanted to see whether having students build virtual worlds that embodied concepts and principles they were learning as part of their regular curriculum would help them understand what they were studying. We were especially interested in determining whether this radically new technology and the learning strategies it supports can help children who are judged by traditional criteria to be less likely to succeed in school. Experience has shown that the only way technology can be successful in schools is if teachers and students have access to the machines they need, have the software to make them work, and have the knowledge and skill to take control of both. We addressed the access issue by setting up a van-based outreach program that carried VR workstations to schools. In the schools where worlds were built, we addressed software and control issues by providing the schools with modeling software that teachers and students learned to use, by building our own Supercard tool for automatically generating computer code that made virtual objects behave in particular ways, by putting on training workshops for teachers, and by working long hours with children as they planned and built their worlds. We used two vans. Each was equipped with a Division, Inc. Provision 100 workstation, a head-mounted display that provides stereo vision and audio, a hand-held wand for moving through virtual worlds and manipulating virtual objects, and an electromagnetic tracker that tracked both the position and attitude of the student's hand and head. The Provision 100 is a 486 system running UNIX. It achieves its high rate for rendering graphic images by graphics boards that provide massively parallel graphic processing. The system has sound capability. It runs dVISE software from Division (based in the U.K., with a U.S. office) that uses a C-like scripting language that serves to build and run virtual worlds. A limited amount of authoring and editing can be done through a graphic interface that runs under X-Windows. Centered Around Two Projects Our plan centered around two projects, which we called the Hors d'oeuvre and the Entree. All schools enjoyed the hors d'oeuvre; 14 stayed for the entree. For the hors d'oeuvre, we took a van to each of the VRRV schools for a day, longer in a few cases. We began by giving a presentation about VR to one or two classes of students and their teachers, spending time discussing VR with them. …
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