Interactive Educational Visits With Immersive Virtual Reality

Current Developments in Technology-Assisted Education (2006)

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Interactive Educational Visits with Immersive Virtual Reality
F. J. Suarez*, I. Alvarez
University of Oviedo, Department of Computer Science, 33204 Gijón, Spain
Educational visits are defined as trips with a group of students outside the school [1] or university [2], for
example to museums or industries. In this paper wepropose an alternative to the traditional educational
visits that avoids the disadvantages of trips, an immersive virtual reality system that can be used for individual realistic and interactive educational visits.

Keywords: interactive learning; immersive virtual reality

1. Motivation
Perhaps more than anything else, educational visits help to bring education to real life, promote learningby experience and have an impact that is seldom achieved through other means. They make the learning
more enjoyable and deepen the understanding. Nevertheless, there are also disadvantages in such approach, such as the need of extra budget and the risk inherent to any trip. The use of virtual reality techniques in the development of educational applications [3][4] brings new perspectives toeducational
visits [5][6], becoming virtual visits, for example a virtual visit to a museum that is too far away to visit
or even does not exist [7]. Besides, immersive experiences in virtual reality environments can achieve a
very realistic feeling of being in the real places to visit. Based on these techniques, the computer based
system we describe in this paper can be used to provide individualrealistic and interactive educational
visits. Using this kind of system has a lot of benefits in education: learning is self-paced, information is
easier to access, independent discovery-oriented learning is encouraged and learning becomes more
engaging.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: the way of building the virtual places to visit is outlined
in section 2; sections 3 an 4explain how the immersion in the virtual places and interaction with them
are achieved respectively; finally, in section 5 some conclusions and ongoing work are presented.

*

Corresponding author: E-mail: fjsuarez@uniovi.es, Phone: +34 985182223

© FORMATEX 2006

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Current Developments in Technology-Assisted Education (2006)

2. Virtual places
The virtual places are sphericalpanoramic pictures of the places to visit (outdoor or indoor) that cover
360º in both horizontal and vertical axes. The example in fig.1 shows our university campus and includes
all that one person can see in any direction from a specific position in the campus.
The equipment we need to generate the spherical pictures includes digital photo-camera (fig. 2), fish
eye objective (fig. 3) and tripod. Thefield of each basic picture is 180ºx180º, being necessary to take
three pictures, with 120º offset, from the selected position in the place. Special software treatment is
applied to the three picture set to compose the final spherical panoramic picture.

Fig. 1 Example of virtual place (spherical panoramic picture of our university campus)

Fig. 2 Digital photo-camera

© FORMATEX 2006Fig. 3 Fish-eye objective

Current Developments in Technology-Assisted Education (2006)

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3. Immersion
The feeling of immersion is a critical point in our system development. If we want to accurately reproduce the feeling of being in a real place, the user should see the things when he moves his head in any
direction like if he just was there. To achieve that, the user uses a HeadMounted Display (HMD, fig. 4)
with an integrated head movement sensor or Tracker (fig.5). The HMD incorporates one 800x600 pixels
resolution display for each eye and the tracker captures user head movements in the three axes (yaw,
pitch and roll). Fig. 6 shows an user ready for immersion in a virtual place with the HMD on his head
and the tracker over the HDM.
The spherical picture corresponding...