Interaction in an IVR Museum of Color: Constructivism Meets Virtual Reality
- Interaction in an IVR Museum of Color:Constructivism Meets Virtual Reality
Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) environments would seem naturally to lend themselves to hands-on approaches to learning, but the success of such virtual "direct experience" depends heavily on the design of interface and interaction techniques. IVR presents surprisingly difficult interface challenges, and the study of interface and interaction design for educational IVR use is just beginning. In this paper, the authors discuss three issues encountered in the creation of an IVR-based educational project: the use of architectural spaces for structuring a sequence of modules, the trade-offs between metaphorical fidelity and convenience, and the use of IVR in interaction with visualizations of abstract concepts.
Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) [1] has exciting potential for educational applications, enabling students to interact with ideas in new ways. In an IVR environment, students can engage in simulations of real-world environments that are not accessible due to financial or time constraints (high-end chemistry laboratories, for instance) or that are simply not possible to experience, such as the inside of a volcano or an atom. IVRs also enable students to interact with visualizations of abstract ideas-for example, mathematical equations and elements of color theory. The hands-on, investigative learning most natural to IVR is an excellent way to train new scientists and engineers. In addition, because such an environment is computer-generated, it is an ideal future platform for individual and collaborative distance-learning efforts.
IVR lends itself naturally to a constructivist pedagogical approach, that is, one that builds on Piaget's view that knowledge is created by learners through interaction with others and with the world around them [2] and is characterized by first-person, non-symbolically mediated interactions [3]. But the success of such virtual "direct experience" depends heavily on the design of interface and interaction techniques. Although IVR may suggest ease of use and obvious, transparent interface designs, the opposite is, unfortunately, true: IVR presents surprisingly difficult interface challenges. Even techniques as seemingly straightforward as object selection and navigation are the subject of dozens of research papers [4]. The design of IVR interaction that feels natural and promotes learning is an almost entirely unsolved problem. We have been tackling some of the interface and interaction challenges of using IVR for education in a Museum of Color, in which students can perform a number of science museum-like experiments [5].
Although IVR environments are still too expensive and fragile for mainstream educational use, the use of VR in training is well established [6] and its use in entertainment is growing rapidly [7]. Moore's Law [8] can be seen at work in the use of commodity 3D graphics in games and edutainment (the recently released Sony PlayStation 2 has more graphics power than most of today's high-end workstations), suggesting that today's esoteric, immersive environments will become commodified classroom fixtures in the future. We feel, therefore, that it is critical to conduct educational IVR interface and interaction research today, so that educators can take full advantage of IVRs in the near- and long-term future.
Previous Work
The IVR Museum of Color extends ongoing work done in the Exploratories Project <http://www.cs.brown.edu/exploratory> at Brown University. Exploratories are highly interactive learning environments, realized as two- and three-dimensional explorable worlds. The Exploratories Project has a dual mission of creating innovative educational content for the Web and documenting the experiences of creating such software in a Design Strategy Handbook.
We are now at work on a handbook for 2D and 3D desktop applications as part of the Exploratory Project and have presented elements of it in published work [9]. The handbook draws on our own and others' experiences and includes guides, templates, patterns (as in Gamma et al.'s object-oriented "Design Patterns" [10]) and examples. Topics include assessment of resources, descriptions of various pedagogical categories, patterns for implementation, indexed examples and, of course, extensive information on interface and interaction design.
The Exploratories Project has previously focused on 2D and 3D graphics on...
