Digital Space as an Arena for Broadband Educational Opportunities:
Digital Space
Digital space is virtual,
computer generated 3D space, which feels in some sense "real" to its
users (1). Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) techniques ultimately hold the most promise
for realizing the goal of lifelike digital space, but the specialized and
expensive nature of their required apparatus argues against any really
widespread use for the near future. A more promising avenue is offered by what
is known as Desktop VR or Virtual Worlds, wherein a 2D presentation of the 3D
environment is displayed on an ordinary computer monitor, obviating the need
for special hardware.
Whether a virtual space is
presented in immersive or desktop format, certain features are useful to create
a sense of “being there" for the user:
·
A movable viewpoint- This is the absolute minimum requirement: a movable viewpoint, under
user control, allows navigation of the space(2). It is desirable to have
minimal time lag for movements.
·
Synchronous and asynchronous communication- The ability for users to communicate is paramount.
·
Reasonable resolution- A system must be able to present enough polygons and
textures to create a plausible representation of the environment. Complete
verisimilitude is, however, not required, as other factors contribute to the
sense of realism.
·
Embodiment-
User representation in the space by an avatar grounds the movable viewpoint in
a natural context (3). Some desirable traits for an avatar include
·
A repertoire of
gestures and movements
·
Evocative body
shapes
·
Lip-synch
capability, if voice-based
·
Multi-user-
The social phenomena enabled by multiple users are a powerful determinant of a
space's realism, even more important than issues of resolution and lag.
·
Voice is
ideal for synchronous communication, but requires high bandwidth.
·
Sound effects-
Appropriate sounds add greatly to a sense of realism.
·
Hyperlinks-
The ability to link to other locations in the 3D world, as well as to the web,
creates a larger "meta-reality".
Virtual
spaces possessing these attributes will be perceived as real spaces by their
users, and this perception enables and supports activities that affect these
users in meaningful ways. Frequent visitors come to think of their digital
space as home, encouraged in many cases by the ability to customize or extend
space, using persistent objects. Most importantly, the community created by
these frequent visitors provides the social scaffolding for evolving forms of
behavior, including learning and teaching(4).
Early
examples of virtual spaces include MUDs (Multiple User Domain) and MOOs (MUD,
Object Oriented). These worlds are constructed solely from text descriptions,
and all user interaction consists of delivering text messages(5). These
messages are either communications with other participants or instructions to
modify the space in some way, e.g. “Open the door.” or “Place the helmet on the
dancing hare.” The realness of such textual space is analogous to the realness
of a novel, since the world is created in each user’s imagination from its
description. Nonetheless, the interactive and communicative aspects enable a
remarkable sense of place, allowing some users to “live” significant portions
of their lives in these text-based worlds(6).
VR
environments, whether desktop or full-blown immersive, leverage the realistic
qualities of MUDs and MOOs and add to the mix navigable 3D space, with users
represented as avatars. In addition, such features as sound, voice and video
are also often present. These qualities of enhanced VR enable an almost
viscerally real sense of place and community in digital space.
Educational opportunities
Educational
programs, especially those conceived within a Constructivist framework, are
supported by the "artificial reality" of digital space(7). Here are
some features of digital space, which can be useful for creating educational
experiences:
·
Meta-Geography-
Users distributed across the entire globe can be present simultaneously in a
common space.
·
Avatar representation- Can be utilized for role playing, psychodrama. Also
can be used like a school uniform- i.e. race, gender, age, etc. become less
important in the social and educational milieu.
·
Buildability-
It is possible to organize virtual worlds so that the users themselves can
create structures- e.g. students might create a cell from a stockpile of
objects such as mitochondria, chromosomes, etc.
·
Hyperlinking-
This provides a powerful means for explicating subject material. For instance,
students could go inside the nucleus of a virtual cell and by clicking on a
chromosome, be instantly transported to a strand of DNA, where a similar
process could take them to a simulated genetics laboratory.
·
Programmable physical laws- The ability to prescribe, for instance, no gravity or
passing through walls enables activities difficult or impossible in real space.
Real physical laws, such as Maxwell's electric field equations, can likewise be
modeled and experienced from, for instance, an electron's point of view.
Over
the past few years, there have been several pioneering virtual learning
(V-learning) projects, which point to the effectiveness of this
approach(7)(8)(9)(10)(11).
Interestingly, the outcomes of these projects reinforce the centrality
of the active learner in crafting V-learning environments. The ability of these
environments to actively engage learners is in many cases bolstered by allowing
them to actually create objects and spaces.
It is
important to realize that digital space offers truly new potentials, rather
than simply a new slant on business as usual. For instance, the concepts of
virtual embodiment and subjectivity open up to some radical possibilities in
the area of multiple and parallel selves(12), which have never been considered
in any learning paradigm. Creative use of digital space will likely result in
new and unexpected avenues for educational opportunity.
Broad Band
The two
main approaches to digital space, immersive VR and desktop VR, are currently
separated by their very different bandwidth requirements. Immersive VR uses a
stereo visual display to create a true 3D image. Additionally, various methods
are employed to locate users in space, and this information is used to update
the display as they move about. The resulting data load makes it impractical to
network immersive VR over any but the fastest networks, meaning that most
projects employing these techniques are limited to participants at a single
location, and usually without multiple simultaneous users.
Even
within the desktop VR model, such features as voice and video impose a strain
on resources. This often means that the number of avatars in a space is
limited, or that the voice or video is so degraded as to be of little use.
The
advent of the Broad Band era promises to radically ease such restrictions. The
fast transfer rates afforded by fiber and wireless will enable widespread
integration of voice and video into digital space, tighten the granularity of
interactive and visual elements, and allow for sophisticated motion tracking of
widely dispersed users. Even without the use of stereo goggles, such
improvements will enable remarkably realistic online worlds.
Two of
the major areas targeted by the Baylor Broad Band study are Interactive Games
and Education(13). The vision of a Digital Learning Space that I am proposing
can be considered to live where those areas intersect, although gaming's
relentless goal orientation is not really needed to evoke the reality of such a
space. Back in the early days of VR, it was touted as a "new ground for
being" by psychologists and philosophers—it is most certainly a new ground
for learning, and one with great potential.
Scalable experience
Rather
than waiting for the kind of full-bore interactive digital space that Broad
Band will enable, there is much that can be done now, with existing
technologies, to gain valuable, scalable experience. In particular, a large and
growing network of educators and technologists is already in place, devoted to
the educational application of a particular desktop VR platform, ActiveWorlds.
ActiveWorlds is a non-VRML system for creating on-line 3D virtual
worlds, in which visitors are represented by avatars. It is by far the most
populous of such systems, with hundreds of individual worlds organized into the
ActiveWorlds Universe. Hundreds of thousands of people have at least some
experience with this platform, and it is becoming a sort of lingua franca for
desktop VR.
Early in the development of ActiveWorlds, many people realized
that this technology had important implications for education, and they began
putting up worlds to explore different aspects of virtual learning. As a
fall-out of the first Conference on Virtual Learning (V-Learn) at Cornell U. in
1999, a separate Universe (the EduVerse) was created, solely for worlds
dedicated to educational purposes and accessible only to persons with proven
interest in virtual learning(14). Currently, scores of institutions and
organizations are represented in the EduVerse.
Any new
Learning World in the Eduverse should maintain a commitment to certain core
values. In particular, it should keep the learner and the learner’s concerns as
its central focus, while employing virtual worlds technologies to expand that
focus. Here are some possible scenarios:
(1) A world for health and life science: The increasing focus of our society on health issues
makes this a natural subject for virtual learning. A world could be modeled,
for example, after a human brain, to whatever level of realism the 3D
techniques will allow. Top level will be large enough that a virtual class can
be held inside and/or outside the brain structure, allowing the teacher to
point out interesting areas as the class progresses. Hyperlinking will allow
the level of detail to expand or contract as the situation warrants, such as to
examine the myelin sheath on a neuron or PET-scan imagery of brain activity.
Such a
world is conceived as a resource for teaching current theories of brain
physiology and mental functioning, and also for promoting mental health issues.
To this end, it would be desirable to form alliances with institutions,
agencies and organizations active in these fields, which could provide content
and experts. For example, The National Institute of Mental Health and M.D.
Anderson Hospital come to mind as possible partners for a “Brain World”.
There
are different kinds of learners who could benefit from such a learning
environment, and the experience can be tailored to suit their several needs.
One group is those people defined as students, who are enrolled in classes,
either for credit or for personal advancement. Such classes can be offered
through typical institutions like medical schools, or they might be based
entirely in virtual worlds, like the LifeLearn project. These learners will
benefit from the most realistic modeling of artifacts and processes and
possibly less on the social aspects of the world.
Another, more informally defined set of learners are those interest groups related to specific aspects of brain or mental health, such as Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, addiction, etc. As affinity groups, such learners will use the embodied, social aspect of the world to great advantage, relying less on its modeling and simulation capabilities.
Of
course, there are many ways to organize a health-oriented world. A really
ambitious plan would be to have an entire human body, like “The Incredible
Journey”, and then hyperlink to various areas and levels of detail.
(2) A world for astronomy and space science: There are a number of objects and scenarios, which
could be utilized for educational purposes; one possibility is to use a spiral
galaxy as our model. Learners could navigate throughout the galaxy unhampered
by relativistic limitations, experiencing the various parts. Hyperlinking can
bring individual stars and other objects to the fore, enabling them to be
studied in greater detail; e.g. one could “zoom” in on a black hole orbiting a
blue giant star and observe their interactions.
The
same sorts of observations can be made for any virtual learning worlds as were
made for the health science world, as regards partners, potential audience,
etc. It is worth noting that the EduVerse currently holds at least one world,
“Aries”, which employs imagery and topographic data from Mars orbiting
satellites to give visitors a visceral experience of the Martian surface.
(3) A “Wrapper” World: This kind of environment might be similar to a
classroom in the real world, or it could take the form of a sphere with no
gravity, or many other forms. Its main characteristics are:
·
It is not
thematically tied to specific subject matter.
·
It is organized
in a way thought to be advantageous for teaching in a virtual environment.
Such a world provides an
easily accessible “wrapper” for any subject matter. Hyperlinking is used to teleport
as desired from this environment to such thematic environments as listed above,
as well as for linking to relevant Web sites.
This can be seen as the
general case for a V-Learning world, and it has the greatest flexibility in
terms of architecture and curriculum. There are currently many educational
worlds of this type, although many of them seem more concerned with copying some
real world space than with maximizing the use of virtual space for learning.
I believe that we can create
a presence in digital learning space that will extend the state of the art for
learning in virtual environments. Although worthwhile in its own right, I see
this exercise as valuable training for the kinds of immersive on-line learning
environments people will expect with the maturation of Broad Band technologies.
ActiveWorlds- http://www.activeworlds.com/
ActiveWorlds Educational
Universe- http://www.activeworlds.com/edu/index.html
V-Learn, a SIG for Virtual
Learning- http://www.ccon.org/vlearn/index.html
Active Art Design (a leading
designer of virtual environments)- http://www.activeart.co.uk/
References
1.
The Performance of Cyberspace: An Exploration Into
Computer-Mediated Reality-
Gretchen
Barbatsis and Michael Fegan, Michigan State University
Kenneth
Hansen, Aalborg University, Denmark
http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol5/issue1/barbatsis.html
2.
User Embodiment in Collaborative Virtual Environments-
Steve Benford, Department of
Computer Science, The University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
John Bowers. Department of
Psychology, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
Lennart E. Fahlén, The Swedish
Institute of Computer Science,Stockholm, Sweden
Chris Greenhalgh, Department of Computer Science,The University of Nottingham,
UK
Dave Snowdon, Department of Computer Science,The University of
Nottingham, UK
http://www.acm.org/sigchi/chi95/proceedings/papers/sdb_bdy.htm
3. Lifelike
Avatars - Gesture and Narrative Language Group-
Hannes Vilhjalmsson, MIT
Media Lab
http://renga.www.media.mit.edu/avatars/
4. 9
Timeless Principles For Building Community-
Web Techniques, Jan 1998
Amy Jo Kim
http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/1998/01/kim/
5. MediaMOO-
a MOO by Amy Bruckman
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Amy.Bruckman/MediaMOO/
6.
Life on the Screen-
Sherry Turkle
http://www.transparencynow.com/turkle.htm
7. Constructivism
in Practice: the Case for Meaning-Making in the Virtual World-
Kimberley M. Osberg, U of
Washington, Dept of Education
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/publications/r-97-47/index.html
8. MOOSE Crossing: Construction,
Community, and Learning in a Networked Virtual World for Kids-
Amy Bruckman, MIT Media Lab
http://asb.www.media.mit.edu/people/asb/thesis/
9. Archaeological Virtual Worlds
for Public Education-
Donald H. Sanders, Ph.D.,
President, Learning Sites, Inc.
http://cssjournal.com/sanders.html
10. Collaboration
in a Virtual World: Support for Conceptual Learning?-
Paul Brna & Rob Aspin,
Computer Based Learning Unit
Leeds University, Leeds,
England, UK
http://www.cbl.leeds.ac.uk/~paul/papers/hci-et97paper/hci-et.html
11. The
NICE Project: Learning Together in a Virtual World-
Andrew Johnson, Maria
Roussos, Jason Leigh,
Christina Vasilakis, Craig
Barnes, Thomas Moher
Electronic Visualization
Laboratory & Interactive Computing Environments Laboratory
University of Illinois at
Chicago
http://www.evl.uic.edu/aej/vrais98/vrais98.2.html
12. An
Introduction to Dissociative Identity Disorder as a Model for Distributed
Subjectivity in Cyberspace-
Vernon Reed, BIOAPPARAT;
ACTLab, U of Texas
http://www.bioapparat.com/LegionWeb/Writing/Dissociation.html
13. HSA
& iTV Report for Human Code-
Institute for Technology
Innovation Management, Baylor University
http://cst.baylor.edu/itim_hc/1999/default.shtml
14.
V-Learn
Conference May 20-21, 1999
Cornell University, Ithaca NY
http://www.tc.cornell.edu/Exhibits/Worlds/workshop99/workshop.html
Prepared by:
Vernon Reed
*evolving the BIOAPPARATUS*
vr@bioapparat.com
www.bioapparat.com
512.345.4177