by Roberto Cuccu, Editor
Welcome to the first
issue of Il Mondo di Fantasia - 3D Educational Magazine.
This magazine's mission is to provide a forum for reporting on people,
events, technology, and issues involved in the use and study of 3D Active
Worlds and Virtual Reality in Education.
There has been a great deal of discussion recently about the development
of Internet based activities and of Active worlds.
A Virtual World is a world without
limitation, a world as unlimited as dreams. It's also a world that's shared,
like the physical world. The thing that's remarkably interesting to us
about Virtual Reality is that you
can make up reality and share it with other people. It's like having a
collaborative lucid dream. It's like having shared hallucinations, except
that you can compose them like works of art; you can compose the external
world in any way at all as an act of communication.
Probably not many know of the number of creative projects in many different fields based on virtual reality and active worlds, such as the one of Dr. Lynne Anderson-Inman, director of the Center for Election Studying at the University of Oregon, who is using the technology of virtual reality to investigate the possibilities of teaching mobility skills to children with severe orthopedic impairments who are operating motorized wheelchairs.
Virtual reality has also been used as a new medium for the delivery of therapy through virtual reality environments. These computer based artificial worlds, which are directly reachable through the Internet and enable personal interactions, have proved to be able to create new modes of therapy. Therapy World is a prototype virtual reality environment that has been successful in providing mental health therapeutic care.
Our vision for this forum, Il Mondo di Fantasia - 3D Educational Magazine, is to help, in a modest way, to explore and enrich the research and practice of educational projects based on 3D Worlds. The potentialities of educational experiences on 3D Active Worlds can lead the way towards a new approach to learning, based on multiple intelligences, constructivism, active and collaborative learning.
We invite you to read this first issue, and add your stories and experiences to what we publish here.
roberto cuccu
continue to Content of First Issue
Notes
(1) Here's how Orthopedic research scientist Dean Inman describes the
research:
To do this, we have created three virtual worlds. Each world is created
three dimensionally in the HMD as you drive an electric wheelchair mounted
on rollers. A joystick that is hooked up to the computer allows you to
change speed and direction.
The first world is a black-and-white tile floor that runs to infinity
in all directions. There are no obstacles. It's a wide-open space where
you can turn, or stop or reverse. We estimate that you can go between
80 and 100 miles an hour, which is quite exciting to a child who has never
experienced independent mobility before.
The second world is full of things like ice and mud and obelisks of various
kinds that become active when you get close enough to them. You cannot
go through them; you have to go around them. In this world, we've laid
the foundations for purposeful exploration, discovery, and visual immersion.
If you go far enough in any direction, the world ends, and you fly.
The third world is modeled after a traffic intersection in Eugene, Oregon,
complete with cars, a crosswalk, and lights. Our goal is to teach kids
to cross safely in a virtual world, while we measure the effects of the
training in the actual world.
from VR World
(2) This is how Frances Pagin describes the experiment:
This was based on the view that a VRE real time chat interface could
offer opportunities that the two dimensional web page based mental health
chat rooms could not. The rationale underpinning this was the opportunity
to create problem specific contexts for clients, client specific contexts
or enhanced environments enabling them to deal with problems previously
only able to be catered for in offline contexts. These contexts also could
be enhanced by the use of free voice based programs and face-to-face interaction
using web cams.
More on Therapy World can be found at:
http://members.kabsi.at/t01/tw2/
