Andrew E. Johnson

Learning and Building Together in an Immersive Virtual World

This paper describes the design, evaluation, and lessons learned from a project involving the implementation of an immersive virtual environment for children called NICE (Narrative-based, Immersive, Constructionist/Collaborative Environments). The goal of the NICE project was to construct a testbed for the exploration of virtual reality as a learning medium within the context of the primary educational reform themes of the past three decades. With a focus on informal education and domains with social content, NICE embraces the constructivist approach to learning, collaboration, and narrative development, and is designed to utilize the strengths of virtual reality: a combination of immersion, telepresence, immediate visual feedback, and interactivity. Based on our experiences with a broad range of users, the paper discusses both the successes and limitations of NICE and concludes with recommendations for research directions in the application of immersive VR technologies to childrens learning.

The NICE project: learning together in a virtual world

This paper describes the NICE project, an immersive learning environment for children implemented in the CAVE and related multi-user virtual reality (VR) technologies. The NICE project provides an engaging setting where children construct and cultivate simple virtual ecosystems, collaborate via networks with other remotely-located children, and create stories from their interactions in the real and virtual world.

High-performance dynamic graphics streaming for scalable adaptive graphics environment

The scalable adaptive graphics environment (SAGE) is specialized middleware for enabling data, high-definition video and extremely high-resolution graphics to be streamed in real-time from remotely distributed rendering and storage clusters to scalable display walls over ultra high-speed networks. In this paper, we present the SAGE architecture, focusing on its dynamic graphics streaming capability. In the SAGE framework, multiple visualization applications can be streamed to large tiled displays and viewed at the same time. The application windows can be moved, resized and overlapped like any standard desktop window manager. Every window movement or resize operation requires dynamic and non-trivial reconfiguration of the involved graphics streams. This approach has been successfully shown to scale to support streaming on the LambdaVision 100 megapixel display wall. SAGE is now being extended to support distance collaboration with multiple endpoints by streaming visualization to all the participants

A review of tele-immersive applications in the CAVE research network

This paper presents an overview of the tele-immersion applications that have been built by collaborators around the world using the CAVERNsoft toolkit, and the lessons learned from building these applications. In particular the lessons learned are presented as a set of rules-of-thumb for developing tele-immersive applications in general.

Multi-perspective collaborative design in persistent networked virtual environments

We present an approach to applying virtual reality in architectural design and collaborative visualization which emphasizes the use of multiple perspectives. These perspectives, including multiple mental models as well as multiple visual viewpoints, allow virtual reality to be applied in the earlier, more creative, phases of the design process, rather than just as a walkthrough of the final design. CALVIN, a prototype interface which implements these ideas, has been created using the CAVE virtual reality theatre.

Advances in the Dynallax Solid-State Dynamic Parallax Barrier Autostereoscopic Visualization Display System

A solid-state dynamic parallax barrier autostereoscopic display mitigates some of the restrictions present in static barrier systems such as fixed view-distance range, slow response to head movements, and fixed stereo operating mode. By dynamically varying barrier parameters in real time, viewers may move closer to the display and move faster laterally than with a static barrier system, and the display can switch between 3D and 2D modes by disabling the barrier on a per-pixel basis. Moreover, Dynallax can output four independent eye channels when two viewers are present, and both head-tracked viewers receive an independent pair of left-eye and right-eye perspective views based on their position in 3D space. The display device is constructed by using a dual-stacked LCD monitor where a dynamic barrier is rendered on the front display and a modulated virtual environment composed of two or four channels is rendered on the rear display. Dynallax was recently demonstrated in a small-scale head-tracked prototype system. This paper summarizes the concepts presented earlier, extends the discussion of various topics, and presents recent improvements to the system.

CAVERNsoft G2: a toolkit for high performance tele-immersive collaboration

This paper describes the design and implementation of CAVERNsoft G2, a toolkit for building collaborative virtual reality applications. G2s special emphasis is on providing the tools to support high-performance computing and data intensive systems that are coupled to collaborative, immersive environments.This paper describes G2s broad range of services, and demonstrates how they are currently being used in a collaborative volume visualization application.

NICE: combining constructionism, narrative and collaboration in a virtual learning environment

Maria Roussos, Andrew E. Johnson, Jason Leigh, Christina A.Vasilakis, Craig R. Barnes, and Thomas G. Moher {mroussos,ajohnson,jleigh,cvasilak,cbarnes,moher}@eecs.uic.edu Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) & Interactive Computing Environments Lab (ICE) University of Illinois at Chicago 851 S. Morgan St., Room 1120 Chicago, IL 60607-7053 USA +1.312.996-3002 +1.312.413-7585 (FAX) nice@ice.eecs.uic.edu http://www.ice.eecs.uic.edu/~nice/

The Round Earth Project-collaborative VR for conceptual learning

The Round Earth Project is a collaboration among researchers in computer science, education, and psychology. It investigates two alternative pedagogical strategies for teaching children that the Earth is spherical and the implications of that fact. One strategy, which we term the transformationalist approach, attempts to effect conceptual change by breaking down the childrens prior models. In contrast, the selectionist strategy attempts to effect learning in an alternative setting (in our case, a small-diameter asteroid), free of preexisting biases, and to relate that learning back to the target domain-the Earth. Virtual reality (VR) technologies support both pedagogical strategies. In the transformationalist approach, VR simulates the launching of a spacecraft from the Earths surface and subsequent exploration within a fixed-height orbit. In the selectionist approach, VR simulates a small-diameter asteroid.

Supporting transcontinental collaborative work in persistent virtual environments

One long-term goal at the University of Illinois at Chicagos Electronic Visualization Laboratory is to create a persistent virtual environment enabling transcontinental collaboration over high-speed and high-bandwidth networks connected to heterogeneous supercomputing resources and large data stores. Our focus is on researching techniques required to support general collaboration in persistent virtual environments. These techniques include the representation of virtual co-presence, video and audio teleconferencing, virtual reality (VR) interfaces, and database technology for sustaining persistence in virtual worlds. These techniques are used in a collaborative design laboratory called Calvin (Collaborative Architecture Via Immersive Navigation). Calvin was designed to run in the Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE).