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VRET'98 last July was held in the busy multicultural borough of Islington in North London at the City University. This impression of cultural diversity also carried through to the conference itself with presentations from many different parts of the world including a strong presence from our European counterparts. The fast paced life of the Capital was an appropriate setting for a conference that was primarily concerned on getting to grips with the rapid progress that had been made in VR and education and training since last years event at Loughborough.
Tuesday 7th July
The first day opened with an introductory pre-conference workshop intended for those delegates that were newcomers to VR. This was followed by a few remarks from the chairman of last year's conference Professor Roy Kalawsky of Loughborough University. Then Professor Peter Sutcliff of the City University opened the conference noting that he hoped to find evidence of exciting new developments in the area of VR with respect to education and training. He expressed a wish to see greater convergence of the theoretical and applied sides of the discipline and more collaborative work on developing an overall approach to research. He was followed by a keynote address by Mrs. Barbara Roche, MP who is Under Secretary of State at the Department of Trade and Industry, UK. She discussed how she and the UK government see VR fitting into the future of industry. Christine Youngblut1 of the Institute of Defense Analyses, Alexandria, Virginia, USA provided an overview of the adoption of VR and the evaluation of its effectiveness for learning and training. She spoke at length on the nature of the evaluation that is undertaken at her institute noting that one should adopt formative effectiveness or usability. This should be followed by the different evaluative styles that are available such as subjective, objective, informal and finally other techniques involving the use of video, questionnaires, written reports. She noted how it was difficult to isolate the benefits of constructivism, a common theoretical approach in the area of learning and evaluation. She also emphasised that in a world where immersive virtual environments (VE's) are rare and expensive, interactivity is what is most important. Whether an environment is immersive or not is somewhat irrelevant for much of British research into learning with VR since most projects use non immersive desktop VR.
Professor Kalawsky spoke of his experience of having set up the Advanced Virtual Reality Research Centre at Loughborough2. He described how learning might be cognitively different in VR than in traditional educational environments. In the afternoon session the delegates were treated to an intriguing presentation from Professor R Bowen Loftin, University of Houston, Texas, USA. He is the director of Project ScienceSpace3, a joint venture among George Mason University, the University of Houston and NASA's Johnson Space Center, which brings together a collection of immersive virtual worlds designed to aid students in mastering challenging concepts in science. It has principally involved the development of three main virtual learning environments. These are Newton World which provides an environment for investigating the kinetics and dynamics of one-dimensional motion. Maxwell World supports the exploration of electrostatics, while Pauling World studies molecular structures via a variety of representations. Dr Lynne Hall of the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, UK followed with her talk on using intelligent learning environments for use in Entity Relationship Modeling, an important formalism used in designing databases.
For the evening session a number of varied and interesting presentations were given spanning a diverse number of subjects. The first of these was Ian Dolphin of the University of Hull, UK4 with a presentation of a program in which school children are typically given a virtual tour of the inside of a prison in an effort to discourage them from future criminal behavior. The program consists of a series of multimedia presentations involving interviews with prisoners and also a number of interactive educational games that one can play so as to learn more about prison life and criminal behavior. One of the tools used to generate the scenes in the prison environment was QuickTime VR. The reason for choosing it was the increased photo-realism present in contrast to model based VR. In addition it enabled increased interactivity compared to video; some exploration could take place. The Virtual Reality Applications Research Team (VIRART) from the University Of Nottingham, UK followed this presentation with a description of teachers' priorities for virtual learning environments in secondary science. Finally at the end of the first day the organizers made an attempt to push the frontiers of virtual reality even further by staging an online workshop. This took the form of a distance learning demonstration with delegates in London experiencing Professor Veronica Pantelidis' online class hosted in Grenville, East Carolina. Prof. Pantelidis is a highly respected pioneer in VR-based education and her laboratory provides a range of information services to educators throughout the world. This online workshop was hailed a success and provided much useful information for plans to stage a similar event at next year's conference.
Wednesday 8th July
For the morning session most of the presentations were designed for both the education and training streams, thereafter the presentations specialisd towards one or the other. After a plenary address by Phil Hemmings on his report of the Learning Software Taskforce, Andrew Denford, CEO of Denford Ltd. began the morning session with a demonstration of the Virtual Reality Robot as an educational tool. The VR robot provides a step-by-step introduction to Robotics combining a VR medium with a curriculum based teaching package. After the refreshment break delegates had a choice between Leonardo Montecamozzo's presentation on virtual reality assisted psycho-aptitude testing (VAT) or Laurence Scotford's presentation on learning with Lego. According to the Leonardo, psychological testing is still mainly based on simple paper questionnaires and on the evaluation of the results by a psychologist. Virtual reality offers a means to bypass the variables introduced by the human factor, and becomes very effective in testing sessions to standardise conditions of testing, to create a more convincing and involving environment for the candidate and to simulate real working situations. The Lego presentation was probably one of the most enjoyable of the conference. Here Laurence Scotford of LegoMedia International5 along with his colleague demonstrated how they are utilising three dimensional virtual environments for the development of their latest product line due for release in December, 1998. The demonstration showcased a product called Lego Creator which allows children (!) to build, navigate, explore and play with 3D LEGO bricks in a virtual environment. Developed by UK-based developer Superscape VR, the virtual universe offers children a PC-based environment, enabling them to build using individual elements and place complete models within their own selected LEGO world.
Following this presentation was a choice between simulated environments for operator training by Bernard Passagez of Virtuel 3D in France and Costas Davarikas of Systems Informatics in Greece. Mr. Davarikas spoke of the Flexible Learning Environments project that is a collaboration between a number of countries in a venture to establish a virtual school. Steven Gray of Nottingham Trent University, UK, followed this with a presentation on VR and its application in Training for Retail Environments. For the education stream there was a simultaneous presentation from Professor Robert Stone of Virtual Presence and P.C. Phil Gleave of the Greater Manchester Police on a PC-based VR "societal trainer" called Crime Conquest. This is a program that was distributed to up to 300 schools in the greater Manchester area in the spring of 1998. The trainer enables children to enter the bodies of different virtual participants. As witnesses they have to be observant . When playing the role of a police officer they have to make fair and just decisions. The system is designed for presentation to children of 11 years and older (Key Stage 3+), in keeping with some of the aims of the IT components of the National Curriculum. In the afternoon session there were presentations from Dr Mike Griffin of Colt VR on immersive VR for Hazardous Environment training and in the educational stream there was Roger Gilabert of RTZ virtual worlds in Spain. This presentation was a demonstration of the economic, safety, and ecological benefits of VR in Education. This was the first UK showing of a simulation that will eventually be on permanent display in the School of Mining in Berga, Barcelona. The simulation shows students how a subterranean coal mine functions.
For the evening sessions then Daniela Romano and Paul Brna from the University of Leeds, UK discussed the exploitation of factors influencing team decision making while training in a virtual dynamic environment. This project is an effort to enhance team decision making skills in emergency situations using a virtual dynamic environment that not only emulates real life situations without risk, but also provides a number of tools, often missing in real life situations. Another presentation that was intended to run simultaneously on brain activity measurements of users interacting with educational virtual environments was eventually cancelled. This was to have been by Dr Tassos Mikropoulos of the University of Ioannina, Greece. This was followed by a choice between Frederick Gustafsson of Prosolvia, Sweden on simulation based training, and Holly Jameson from the School of Communication, at the University of Washington. She was talking about her project Espace Partagee: a shared virtual environment for language learning with children. Espace Partagee is designed to aid second language acquisition in young children by allowing them to interact with native speakers, permitting linguistic and cultural exchange despite geographic barriers. Preliminary results comparing language education in this setting with more traditional methods were presented at the conference. This ended the second days session.
Thursday 9th July
The final day of the conference began with a workshop chaired by Prof. R Bowen Loftin of the University of Houston, Texas. Panelists included Professors Roy Kalawsky, Robert J Stone and Steven Benford. This workshop covered the strategic and logistical problems that could potentially arise from an attempt to host a simultaneous conference on both sides of the Atlantic and communicating with each other via collaborative Virtual environments. One of the suggestions made was that the use of video conferencing technologies should be given adequate consideration as a possible alternative to use of VR environments. This workshop was followed by a highly stimulating presentation from Andy Dennison of 3D Web Technologies, UK6. This is a company that specialises in the design and construction of three-dimensional web sites. Their presentation focused on the work that they had done for the Museum for Science and Industry in Manchester7 that featured several interactive exhibits that are both entertaining and educational. The applications for 3D web technologies as they see it are endless. Some of the ones that they are currently working on include:
They are achieving this using an array of web based 3D web design tools. These include Surround Video8; Shockwave flash 39 plug-in; Macromedia's shock 3D and Dynamic VRML10.
This presentation was followed by Dr Ramani Pichumani's presentation on the Virtual Frog11. This project based at Stanford University is a long running venture which is concentrating on developing 3D software for visualising anatomy. The precursor to this project was the Virtual Frog Dissection Kit based at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories. However this was not interactive enough. The aims of the project are to develop and assess computer based educational technologies using multimedia and vrml content. The educational approach is to primarily use design based and simulation based learning. The principal goals of the project are to:
The learning goals of the project are to:
The design considerations are to use Java, vrml, no proprietary technologies, non immersivce VR (VR techniques can be slowly introduced); push the envelope towards 3D; have a 2 year hardware/ software horizon. For the content design, teachers and students were consulted. They employed teachers and students in residence. They found that the students wanted interactivity and interesting and engaging problems. The components of the virtual frog are:
The assessment consisted of two main qu4stions:
1. What if any types of learning were enhanced?
2. Which resources are better utilised by the student?
After this presentation, Geoffrey Stephenson, managing director of Knowledge Exchange Technology12 gave a presentation on the state of the art in terms of virtual reality technology both from the web and from various centres around the world. His main point was that when developing a software application, one should try to make it easy, obvious and fun to use as is already common in the computer gaming industry. Prof. Jeff Rickel of the University of Southern California who described virtual "Steve"13 made the final presentation of the conference. This is an autonomous animated agent that cohabits a virtual world with students. Steve helps students learn to perform physical tasks such as operating and maintaining complex equipment. He can demonstrate tasks, explain his actions, can monitor students' performance and provide help when they need it.
At the end of the conference Professor Sutcliff made a few closing remarks noting how much progress had been made since last years conference and the diversity of the applications presented. However he did note a word of caution in that there appeared to be a certain lack of work on the theoretical front particularly in the development of a suitable education and learning framework in which to advance the applied work that had been presented. In addition he hoped that not too much emphasis was being put into the technology for the technologies' sake and that research was actually helping with the design practice. In conclusion then it can be said that VRET'98 was yet another success. If anything the impression was given that the conference organisers have many exciting ideas in how they wish to take the conference into the 21st century and with it the evolution of virtual reality in education and training.
Further Information:
Superscape VR plc. [www.superscape.com]
Prosolvia Clarus AB [www.clarus.se]
Virtual Presence [www.vrweb.com]
The University of Salford [information technology institute] [www.salford.ac.uk/iti]
Advisory Group on Computer Graphics (AGOCG) [www.agocg.ac.uk/]
UK VR Forum (Dept. of Trade and Industry) [www.ukvrforum.org.uk]
Footnotes:
1 Christine Youngblut, University of Washington [www.washington.edu/scivw/youngblutedvr/Vred.html]
2 Advanced Virtual Reality Research Centre at Loughborough University [http://sgi-hvrsk.lboro.ac.uk/~avrrc/]
3 Project ScienceSpace [www.vetl.uh.edu]; [bowen@uh.edu]; [www.virtual.gmu.edu]
4 Prison project [www.curdev.hull.ac.uk/]
5 LEGO Media International [http://www.lego.com/professionals/legomediabus.asp]
6 3D Web Technologies [www.3dwebtech.co.uk]
7 Museum for Science and Industry in Manchester [www.edes.co.uk/mussci]
8 Surround video [www.blackdiamond.com]
9 Shockwave Flash 3 plugin [www.macromedia.com]
10 Dynamic VRML [ASP/Cold Fusion]
11 Virtual Frog [http://www-med.stanford.edu/creatures/]
12 Knowledge Exchange Technology [www.pira.co.uk/ie/]
13 Virtual Steve [www.isi.edu/isd.VET/vet.html]
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