Virtual-reality software that researchers are developing exclusively for educational uses will get technical support from the Federation of American Scientists and funds from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a group that promotes entrepreneurship, a Boston College instructor announced at a gathering on Saturday at Harvard University.
The instructor, Aaron E. Walsh, is leading the ambitious multimillion-dollar project to build a virtual-reality platform within commercial and nonprofit online games and other fantasy spaces. His goal is to promote online learning through interactive, three-dimensional graphics, Internet-based telephony, Web cameras, and other digital media.
The platform standards and best practices are being developed by an international consortium of colleges, research institutes, and companies that want to use virtuality for instruction, research, and training.
Mr. Walsh said the Kauffman Foundation has yet to disclose how much it will contribute to the project, called Immersive Education, but has agreed to support the software documentation, which is a large part of its development.
The project builds on Mr. Walsh’s experience teaching Boston College students online in virtual spaces for three years. In his classes, students learn how to build three-dimensional objects and virtual worlds.
About 40 people, including many college officials, gathered at Harvard on Saturday to learn more about Immersive Education and how educators and researchers are using virtuality. The meeting was a precursor to a larger digital-media conference set for next month in Boston.
Mr. Walsh introduced the audience to the digital alter egos, or avatars, of some of his students as they traveled inside a three-dimensional model of an Egyptian tomb. An avatar of one student, standing in front of a digital jackal, explained that to ancient Egyptians the animal helped transport dead bodies to the underworld. The students have learned about some archaeological sites and tombs of Egypt through three-dimensional models developed by the Theban Mapping Project, based at the American University in Cairo.
Avatars are becoming less cartoonish and more lifelike, Mr. Walsh said. He showed how the faces of some avatars, exhibiting various expressions, were nearly indistinguishable from the faces of the real people they were modeled after.
Mr. Walsh also described Immersive Education’s plans to create mini-games and interactive lessons within the virtual spaces Second Life, Croquet, and Project Wonderland. Those three environments make their code freely available to the public, so people can tailor the environments to their own needs.
Also at the conference, Gene Koo, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, talked about how students at Emerson College and Boston residents were using Second Life to foster civic engagement. They’re using the virtual world to design real public spaces, including a park that will be located near Harvard’s campus expansion project in the Allston neighborhood and adjacent residential areas. And they recreated Boston’s subway system to provide tours of the city’s neighborhoods. The Boston Island in Second Life will be formally presented to the city’s mayor at an event Thursday.
Jeff Orkin, a researcher at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discussed an online game he created called the Restaurant Game. It seeks to mimic the experience of being in a real restaurant as either a waiter or a patron. Mr. Orkin collects and organizes huge amounts of data about people’s experiences in the game to develop automated responses to players’ remarks or questions. Mr. Orkin said that Immersive Education could help similar efforts that combine artificial intelligence and virtuality.
In addition to Boston College, the institutions supporting Immersive Education include: the University of Aizu in Japan, the Israeli Association of Grid Technologies, Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology, Amherst College, Columbia University, NASA, Sun Microsystems Boston, and the New Media Consortium, a higher-education technology group.
