Published by the IEEE Computer Society 0272-1716/14/$31.00 © 2014 IEEE IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 83
Editors: Gitta Domik
and Scott Owen
Education
Creative Educational Use of Virtual Reality
Working with Second Life
Mingliang Cao and Yi Li
Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Zhigeng Pan
Hangzhou Normal University
Josephine Csete, Shu Sun, Jie Li, and Yu Liu
Hong Kong Polytechnic University
V
irtual reality has been widely proposed as
a major technological advance that can
signi cantly support higher education. VR
technology is expected to facilitate
■ visualizing abstract concepts;
■ observing events on macro and micro scales;
and
■ interacting in ways that usually aren’t possible
owing to distance, time, or safety issues.
In many educational cases, VR technology can
■ stimulate interest,
■ improve conceptual understanding,
■ provide immersive and interactive environments
for learning by doing, and
■ enhance the transfer of skills to the real world.
An important educational application of VR is vir-
tual worlds. Universities and other educational insti-
tutions are increasingly using existing virtual-world
platforms to facilitate teaching. In virtual worlds,
students can learn tasks or create projects through
their avatars. They can carry out tasks that could be
dif cult in the real world owing to constraints and
restrictions such as cost, scheduling, or location.
We used the virtual world Second Life (SL) to
help students learn the relationships between
key concepts in designing clothing for functional
comfort. We aimed to stimulate more uid inter-
action between exciting general learning technol-
ogies (in this case, SL) and emerging tools (CAD
for clothing thermal functional design—CTFD)
while incorporating current research (on func-
tional fabrics and high-performance sportswear)
in a speci c domain (CTFD).
Second Life
More than 400 educational institutions deliver
educational programs or maintain a presence on
SL. SL offers a ready-made platform for advanced
educational use with the potential for many kinds
of simulations beyond real-world experiences.
It can provide exploration-based activities that
epitomize dynamic and active engagement, under
authentic learning conditions. It has also been ac-
knowledged as an important tool for supplement-
ing professional training. One academic area that
commonly uses SL is design training.
SL users (residents) create content through 3D
modeling tools and the Linden Scripting Lan-
guage, which is based on languages such as HTML
and VRML (Virtual Reality Mark-Up Language).
Users enter SL via their avatar, whose appearance
is customizable. Avatar appearance and behavior
are important in avatar-based virtual worlds be-
cause users employ avatars to interact with each
other. In some virtual worlds, users create avatars
according to rules given by the virtual environ-
ment (for example, for role playing). In SL, users
have a greater ability to modify their avatar’s ap-
pearance and behavior, to overcome the physical
world’s restrictions and norms.
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