Poster Presentation/Demo Abstract
We believe that providing remote access to lab equipment and educational materials in a virtual 3D environment, including 3D visualizations, has many educational advantages for remote collaboration. We are using Sun’s Wonderland environment to construct prototypes of such environments, and will demonstrate a prototype for a magnetostatics experiment and visualization.
Evaluation Results of a 3D Virtual Environment for Internet- accessible Physics Experiments
A paper presented at ICL2009
Statement of the problem or issue
With the increasing globalization of education, and MIT’s own commitment to increase student experiences abroad, collaboration at a distance is becoming increasing important in higher education. The goal of this project is to investigate and evaluate the use of Sun’s Wonderland 3D immersive environment as a collaborative tool for communicating with distributed project teams and as a platform for providing collaborative access to educational materials.
Description of activity, project, solution, and outcome
Sun’s immersive 3D environment Wonderland is an emerging technology designed to facilitate collaboration between geographically distributed team members. While similar to other 3D immersive environments such as Second Life, Wonderland focuses on providing open source tools for collaboration. These tools include high quality spatially localized audio, shared whiteboards, HTML and pdf viewers, streaming video, and shared virtual desktops. Since Wonderland is open source, we can develop custom tools and modules to meet our own requirements. We have build a prototype “world” in which avatars can control a “real” experiment which is external to the virtual world, and observe the magnetic fields around a “virtual” version of the same experiment, with data input from that experiment, in the virtual world. We will be demonstrating that virtual world in our presentation.
Importance or relevance to other faculty, staff, students, departments, and programs
This project has given us experience with a virtual world environment and with that experience we can now evaluate how (or whether) this technology can be used to enhance an MIT education, both locally and globally. We have a broader goal in mind than this initial project. If our experience here is favorable, we plan to look for external funding for an on-going effort along these lines. This project will give us experience with the technology which we will then use as “proof-of-concept” evidence in proposals to outside funding agencies, such as NSF, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Department of Education.
John Belcher, Phillip Bailey, Fabio Ricardo Dos Santos, Mark Bessette
Department of Physics
(Presented at MIT Educational Technology Fair 2009)
Topic Area(s)
4. Incorporating visualizations and simulations to deepen student understanding
7. Using virtual worlds for Geographically Distributed Groups