Francisco Jos Surez Alonso

1
Interactive Educational Visits with Immersive
Virtual Reality

• Francisco José Suárez Alonso
• Igor Suárez Álvarez
• UNIVERSITY OF OVIEDO (Spain)
• Computer Engineering Research on Interactive
  Multimedia Services

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Abstract

• Educational visits are defined as trips with a
  group of students outside the school 1 or
  university 2, for example visits to museums or
  industries
• In this paper we propose an alternative to the
  traditional educational visits that avoids the
  disadvantages of trips, an immersive virtual
  reality system that can be used for individual
  realistic and interactive educational visits

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Motivation (i)

• Educational visits help to bring education to
  real life, promote learning by experience and
  have an impact that is seldom achieved through
  other means
• There are also disadvantages in such approach,
  such as the need of extra budget and the risk
  inherent to any trip

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Motivation (ii)

• The use of virtual reality techniques in the
  development of educational applications 34
  brings new perspectives to educational visits
  56, becoming virtual visits, for example a
  virtual visit to a museum that is too far away to
  visit or even does not exist 7
• Immersive experiences in virtual reality
  environments can achieve a very realistic feeling
  of being in the real places to visit, providing
  extra advantages such as interactivity

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Virtual places

• Virtual place spherical panoramic picture of
  the place to visit (outdoor or indoor) that
  covers 360º in both horizontal and vertical axes
• The example in the following slide shows our
  university campus and includes all that one
  person can see in any direction from a specific
  position in the campus

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Virtual places
7
Virtual places

• Equipment to generate the spherical pictures
• digital photo-camera
• fish eye objective (180ºx180º field)
• tripod

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Virtual places

• Three pictures are taken, with 120º offset, from
  the selected position in the place
• Special software treatment is applied to the
  three picture set to compose the final spherical
  panoramic picture

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Immersion

• The feeling of immersion is a critical point in
  our system development
• If we want to accurately reproduce the feeling of
  being in a real place, the user should see the
  things when he moves his head in any direction
  like if he just was there

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Immersion

• The user uses a Head Mounted Display (HMD) with
  an integrated head movement sensor or Tracker

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Immersion

• The HMD incorporates one 800x600 pixels
  resolution display for each eye and the tracker
  captures user head movements in the three axes
  (yaw, pitch and roll)

12
Immersion

• The spherical picture corresponding to a virtual
  place is presented to the user in the HMD through
  a special player running on a portable computer

• With the feedback provided by the tracker, the
  player shows in real-time the field of the
  spherical picture corresponding to the user head
  direction, enabling him for a realistic
  exploration of the whole virtual place

13
Interactivity

• Interactivity makes possible
• zoom in and zoom out
• select objects in the place to hearing audio
  explanations about them
• (e.g. objects in a virtual museum)
• change our position in the place
• (and so our point of view)
• jump to neighbour places
• (e.g. from one room to other in the museum)

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Interactivity

• Interaction with virtual places is achieved using
  a Data Glove, a well known device in virtual
  reality
• Data gloves capture hand fingers movements and
  enables emulation of a computer mouse

• Our data glove model has also three configurable
  function buttons on its control box fixed to the
  arm

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Interactivity

• Interaction is possible within two working modes,
  named zoom mode and hot-spot mode, started with
  corresponding function buttons on the control box
• The third button turns back to the initial normal
  working mode, where the user can just explore the
  virtual place

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Interactivity

• In zoom mode, zoom is controlled by movement of
  some fingers
• In hot-spot mode, the spots with audio
  information and links to other positions/places
  are indicated with circles and squares
  respectively
• Selection of the spots is achieved thanks to a
  pointer in the centre of the vision field and the
  ability to click with a finger movement when the
  pointer is over a spot

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Interactivity
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Conclusions (i)

• As an alternative to traditional educational
  visits and its inherent problems (for many
  schools, real-place field trips are risky and
  time-consuming), an immersive virtual reality
  system for individual realistic and interactive
  educational visits was presented in this paper

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Conclusions (ii)

• The system is based on a computer controlled
  hardware kit composed of head mounted display,
  head tracker and data glove for interaction with
  the virtual places to visit
• In order to promote collaborative learning
  between different users, access to virtual places
  through internet is also possible
• The system has a big potential not only in
  education but also in other fields we are now
  exploring like virtual tourism 8

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Acknowledgements

• This work was supported by the Industrial
  Technology University Institute (IUTA) in
  Asturias (Spain)

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References

• 1 Educational visits UK web site,
  http//www.educationalvisitsuk.com/
• 2 Educational visits fieldwork, University of
  Wales, http//www.aber.ac.uk/visitors/en/school
  s_guide.html
• 3 C. Macpherson and M. Keppell, Virtual
  reality What is the state of play in education?,
  Australian Journal of Educational Technology,
  14(1) (1998), pp. 60-74, http//www.ascilite.org.a
  u/ajet/ajet14/macpherson.html
• 4 R. D. Reid and W. Sykes, Virtual Reality in
  Schools The Ultimate Educational Technology, T H
  E Journal (Technological Horizons In Education),
  Vol. 26 (1999), http//www.thejournal.com/articles
  /14132
• 5 North Carolina virtual visits,
  http//www.itpi.dpi.state.nc.us/vvisits/default.ht
  ml
• 6 Virtual visits, http//alri.org/visits/vv.html
  
• 7 J.P. Bowen, J. Bennett and J. Johnson,
  Virtual Visits to Virtual Museums, Museums and
  the Web An International Conference, Toronto,
  Canada, 22-25 April (1998), http//www.archimuse.c
  om/mw98/papers/bowen/bowen_paper.html
• 8 Virtual visit to Gijón (Spain),
  http//castor.edv.uniovi.es/smi/v-tourism/