Virtual Reality in Education

M. Kandan

Kandan works in the NIIT-Centre for Research in Cognitive Systems (NIIT-CRCS). He is interested in the psychology of on-line learning.

If the thought of dissecting a frog makes you wanna throw up, and frog dissection is a must-do in your curriculum, then maybe virtual reality is for you. But what is virtual reality?

Virtual reality is the technology that allows its users to become immersed in a computer generated virtual world. It includes the technology for three-dimensional displays, methods for generating virtual images including 3-D modeling and techniques for orienting the user in the virtual world.

It is a proven fact that the first hand experience provides immense learning to the learners. All VR environments are first person in their approach. It provides a first hand approach to learning without the hazards of dealing with the real environment. Imagine experiments that you need to do with certain hazardous chemicals, or practicing surgical techniques without risking a human life. In the future, you will be able to do this through the virtual worlds. You will be able to conduct experiments without risking an accidental explosion in the lab; or visit a range of virtual galaxies to study their properties. In your History class, you will be able to visit different historical events. Perhaps, you can even interact with historical figures, and see the effect of your decisions on the present. All these require a virtual environment.

Further, the virtual environment can be readily modified, either to provide new challenges through adjusting levels of difficulty or to provide training prompts to facilitate learning.

The best-known example of VR hands-on training is flight simulation. But VR training is increasingly being used in the initial training of hazardous jobs like the boiler maintenance, the decontamination process of hazardous radioactive sites, disaster response training for airport crews in handling airline crashes, etc. Also VR is being used to train physicians to carry out intricate surgical procedures such as laparoscopies, arthroscopies, endoscopies and other minimally invasive surgeries. VR provides a view of the surgical field normally blocked during such procedures and enables trainees to get much needed practice for the operation of instruments in minimally invasive surgery.

A basic Virtual Reality setup includes a stereoscopic headset that the user wears in order to perceive a 3D view, and some form of navigational input device such as a space ball, mouse, or joystick. One of the basic features of virtual reality is the provision of a sense of actual presence in and control over the simulated environment. This feature is achieved to greater or lesser extents in the various applications of virtual reality, depending upon the need. In the most technically advanced applications of virtual reality, known as "immersive" VR, the user is essentially isolated from the outside world and fully wrapped up within the computer-generated environment. More elaborate setups can include many different sorts of VR devices such as head mounted displays (HMDs), gloves, motion sensors, etc.

HMDs are devices that typically look like a helmet, which have a small video screens placed at a short distance in front of your eyes. Or in some cases miniature projection devices that project images directly onto each retina. Also, there are HMDs, which has the tracking capability that detects the direction and speed of head movements to make the rest of the VR system to react appropriately.

Gloves contain various types of sensors or a tactile feedback device to allow a user to interact with the visual VR environment. The software coordinates the interaction of the gloved hand and the visual display. Using such gloves a user can see an object in the virtual world and, be able to pick up the object and place it somewhere else. Some of these devices can even provide tactile feedback -- you can 'feel' the solidity of the object.

Motion sensors are already being used in the film and television industry. These devices trace the body movements through small dots/marks attached to a body suit at joint positions (e.g., wrists, ankles, elbows, knees, head, face, etc.) of an actor. A pair of video units detects the movement of these dots by the accompanying software and linked to the similarly placed dots on a computer-generated virtual person. With sophisticated software the virtual person can then be very realistically animated using various clips of the recorded movements of the actor. In some applications the focus of the motion sensing is on the face of the actor - head, eye and mouth movements being mimicked on a speaking virtual character.

Virtual Reality requires sophisticated software in order to provide a compelling experience. The software must be able to process the inputs coming from trackers and input devices, and then update the displays at least 20 times each second. This is further complicated by the fact that there may be more than one person in the virtual world, more than one set of inputs and displays, and more than one networked computer running the simulation. The software creates and maintains an internal database of all the objects in the virtual world, continually monitors changes to the database, and distributes this information to all the computers participating in the virtual world. Examples of VR software are VRML, Sense-8, Division, Cosmos, etc.

Though VR is being used to support education in a variety of fields in a limited way, it has not made any major inroads into the field of education in general, and online education in particular. The reasons are many. However, the major bottleneck is the complexity and high cost involved in developing VR applications. Lack of adequate bandwidth availability currently is another reason for its entry into the online education. However, these bottlenecks will go soon with the developments in authoring software for VR applications and advancements in Internet technologies.

References:

Geoffrey Wong and Vincent Wong "Virtual Reality in Space Exploration" Accessed on 30/11/2000. URL: http://www-dse.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nd/surprise_96/journal/vol4/kcgw/report.html

Patrice (Tamar) Weiss and Adam S. Jessel "Virtual Reality Applications to Work" Accessed on 30/11/2000. URL: http://www.utoronto.ca/atrc/rd/library/papers/weiss.html

Colin Macpherson and Mike Keppell (1998) " Virtual reality: What is the state of play in education? Accessed on 30/11/2000. URL: http://cleo.murdoch.edu.au/ajet/ajet14/macpherson.html