Virtual ReaJity for Education?

Don Allison Mathematical Sciences Department

SUNY College at Oneonta Oneonta, NY 13820

01-607-436-3439

allisodl @ oneonta.edu

Larry F. Hodges GVU Center/College of Computing

Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA 30332-0280

01-404-894-8787

hodges@cc.gatech.edu

ABSTRACT It is still unclear what, if any, impact virtual reality will have on public education. The virtual reality gorilla system is being used as a testbed to study if and how virtual reality might be use ful as an aid in educating middle school children, and to investigate the issues that arise when building virtual reality systems for knowledge acquisition and concept formation.

Keywords Virtual reality, education, middle school.

1. INTRODUCTION In the late 80's and early 90% Virtual Reality (VR)caugh

the imagination of the public and press, especially the science fiction reading public. Books by Vernor Vinge, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and others presented an engaging view of the world in which VR technology was pervasive, and readers assumed that it wouldn't be too long until the scenarios described would be fact and not fiction. It seemed everyone wanted their own personal Holodeck, and based on the press coverage, the thought it was just a matter of working out a few details until Holodecks would be generally available. More than one VR researcher has said that VR was in danger of disappearing into its own "hype".

One area where the hype was especially intense was education. With stories in the American press about how schools were failing to educate students and how test scores were continually declining, people were searching for a panacea to cure all the ills of the educational system. There was a contingent of technophiles in the education community who advocated VR as the wave of the future in education, although what was meant b VR was very much in dispute--definitions ranged from a CAVE

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for each student all the way down to web surfing.

2. RELATED WORK The growing public popularity of virtual reality, combined

with public concern about the education system has resulted in almost any program that uses a computer display to do something remotely related to education being touted as being a virtual reality educational application. Part of this confusion is engendered by people sometimes referring to any computer simulation as virtual reality, since the action is taking place inside of a computer instead of in the real world. This project focuses on virtual reality in a more restricted sense. One distinguishing criterion is that it involves simulating an environmen interactively and viewing the results in an immersive fashion using a head-tracked display.

There have been relatively few systems bull and tested to determine the usefulness of a virtual reality system as a tool for knowledge acquisition. Brelsford[2] reported on a physics simulator designed to give students better intuition about physics. In this system the students were given a contro lable length pendulum and three balls of variable mass. They were allowed to manipulate gravity, air drag, friction and several initial conditions and were directed to perform experiments for an hour (after some introductory instruction about the system). A control group of students was given a lecture for an hour over the same material. Four weeks after the exposure, the students were recalled and given a surprise exam over material covered in the experiments. Both the junior high and the college student groups who had experimented in the virtual laboratory showed better retention than the groups who had been given the lecture

The University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Lab (HITL) has also been doing some work on systems to test the uses o f virtual reality in education. One system that they had proposed, which was targeted at K -12 education, was the Spatial Algebra system of Winn and Bricken[8]. To address the conceptual difficulties some students had mastering basic algebraic manipulations required to transform expressions and solve equations, they proposed constructing a system where variables and constants were represented by boxes, and operations were represented by relative positions of these boxes. The students would manipulate these boxes instead of the formal symbols of the equation being solved. Unfortunately, this

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system wasn't implemented, so any discussion of possible results is just speculation.

A second project that has seen a couple of incarnations uses virtual reality to teach K-12 students about virtual reality itself. Run initially as a summer camp[3], it has more recently been implemented as the Virtual Reality Roving Vehicle Project[7]. As the VRRV, this project had two phases, both of which involved installing a complete VR system (with HMD, trackers for head and hand, audio, and a hand held interface "wand") into a van. This van was then driven to the participating schools. The first phase of the project involved going to a school, giving a presentation about VR, a nd then spending the rest of the da demonstrating commercially produced virtual worlds to a select group of students. In the second phase, selected classes were allowed to build (with help from the project researchers) their own virtual worlds. These worlds were organized around teacher-chosen content area. Preliminary results indicated tha participants who actually constructed virtual worlds learned the content material equally well, regardless of general ability, and ended the experience with consistently better attitudes toward science and computers.

The Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago has recently begun experimenting with using their CAVE as an educational tool for young children. They have constructed a virtual garden in which the children can plant and tend various flowers and vegetables, and learn about gardening and working together[6]. In addition to allowing several children to collaborate together in the CAVE, other children can be at remote sites and help work in the garden.

Building on their experiences with the NICE project, as it was known, the EVL has implemented a new instructional virtua environment, the Round Earth project[5]. The goal of this virtual environment is to help teach concepts that are counter-intuitive to the mental model of the world the children have. The specific focus of this system is on the fact that the earth is round, even though our experience seems to show it as flat, and some of the ramifications that would follow if the earth really were round instead of flat.

Finally, there is the ScienceSpace collection of virtual worlds[4] whose intent is to help children understand difficult nonintuitive concepts from physics. Consisting so far of three virtual worlds, these three environments focus on concepts fro mechanics and Newton's laws of motion (NewtonWorld), electrostatic forces and fields (MaxwellWorld), and on the structure of molecules using various representations (PaulingWorld).

3. VIRTUAL GORILLAS, INITIAL WORK Aside from the few systems described above most of the

work studying the use of VR educationally has focused on specific task training. The Virtual Reality Gorilla Exhibit was designed to study using VR as a more general educational technology, and focuses on using VR for general knowledge acquisition and concept formation. The first version of the system focused on teaching middle school students concepts about gorilla behaviors and social interactions that Zoo Atlanta felt were important for students visiting their exhibits to learn, but which they did not seem to be learning just by visiting the zoo.

The goal of the :first version of the VR Gorilla Exhibit was to create an experiential educational tool for middle school students to learn about gorillas' interactions, vocalizations, social structures, and habitat.

3.1 Motivation As part of its mission, Zoo Atlanta educates visitors about

the different animals it houses. Because of its close ties to the Yerkes Primate Center, its gorilla exhibit is one of the best in the world, and it has many special programs that it runs in conjunction with local schools and the community to help educate people about gorillas, their lifestyle, and their plight as an endangered species.

Figure 1. Unobservable Habitat Area

There are many aspects of gorilla life that students can only learn through third hand reading and not by first person observation at a zoo exhibit. For example, the introduction of a new gorilla to a group is done off-exhibit, so students rarely get the chance to observe the establishment or reinforcement of the dominance hierarchy, and challenges to it. Also, for the animals' own protection from disease and because of the logistics problems it would cause the keepers, visitors normally are no~ allowed to observe the night quarters, or the routine involved in letting the gorillas out in the morning and bringing them in at night. When on exhibit, the distance separating the gorillas fro the students makes it hard to hear gorilla vocalizations or observe facial expressions, although they play an important part in indicating gorilla moods. Finally, gorillas are active in earl morning and late afternoon, sleeping most of the middle of the day, but because of the logistics of class scheduling, most middle school students visit the zoo during the sleep period.

The virtual reality gorilla exhibit solves these logistical problems, letting students observe a broader set of gorilla behaviors, time-shifting behaviors that they would normally no see, and letting them visit areas that are normally off limits. B letting students become a gorilla themselves, they can experimen with various stimuli to see how gorillas react to events that the might not normally get to see by observing the gorillas on displa

from afar.

Pedagogically, constructivist theories of education advocate that the more viewpoints presented to the student, the more he learns and the better he retains what he learns. With the virtual

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reality gorilla exhibit, not only does the student get to explore areas that are normally off limits to him (thus allowing him a broader variety of experiences than he would get simply b visiting the zoo), he also gets to assume a gorilla identity and interact with or her gorillas as a peer, getting a differen perspective on gorillas by experiencing gorilla life from a firs person point of view. By interacting with other virtual gorillas, the student learns through first hand experience the social structure of a gorilla group and accepted social interactions. This first-person interaction also tends to hold the student's attention longer, allowing more information to be presented by the syste and retained by the student.

Figure 2' Student Interacting with the Virtual Gorilla Exhibit

3.2 The System from a User's Viewpoint

While students are in the virtual environment, they stand on a circular platform that has a handrail completely encircling them. The HMD provides a biocular (both eyes see the same image) display and monaural audio to the user, and has a single tracker attached to it to provide head tracking (position and orientation). Additional audio feedback is provided by a subwoofer concealed beneath the circular platform. Movement in the virtual world is accomplished by "virtual walking," using the buttons on a joystick handle connected through the mouse port to contro movement.

In this version of the system, the student would don an HMD and find himself in a model of the interpretive center at Zoo Atlanta. Moving through the glass out into gorilla habitat 3, the student could then explore the habitat and interact with the other gorillas of the habitat. Since the user was perceived as a juvenile gorilla by the other virtual gorillas, they would react to his actions accordingly. If the student was too disruptive, he would be removed from the habitat and temporarily placed in a "time out" location, after which he would have to start over in the interpretive center. By trying out various types of actions, the student could learn what was, and what was not, acceptable behavior ~br a juvenile, and also how the other gorillas of the family unit would interact with each other and the student (as a juvenile gorilla).

3.3 Informal Evaluation This system was tested by several groups of students ranging

in age from elementary through high school, and many others were observed interacting with the system. Overall the reactions of users have been very positive. People have stated that they had fun in the system, and their interactions with the system showed that they were learning about appropriate and inappropriate gorilla behaviors as they spent more time interacting with the system.

These observations, would suggest that it is possible to use virtual reality as a general educational tool for middle school students, allowing thereto experience the real world fro viewpoints other than their own, and letting them learn from first- hand experience in environments that would normally be too dangerous or impossible for them to experience in the real world. By providing a rich, factual environment in which to interact, students would be able to personalize their experiences, and internalize the content presented through first person interactions.

A more detailed description of observations and conclusions about the first version of this project can be found in CG&A[1].

Even with the problems that pilot testing pointed out, Zoo Atlanta was impressed enough with the system and its utility that they found the funds to enable them to install a permanent cop of the system in their Conservation Action Resource Center. They are also actively licensing the system to other interested sites.

4 . VIRTUAL GORILLAS: CURRENT WORK

The first implementation of the system showed that it was possible for middle students to acquire concepts through the use of virtual reality. A more formal evaluation of the learning that occurs using this system is currently being conducted. Given the apparent success of the first version, a se cond version is being developed to study the usefulness of VR for teaching more abstract scientific concepts. Instead of focusing on specific concepts about gorilla behavior, this version focuses on teaching students methods of doing research by taking observations, making models that abstract from the observations, using the models to predict, and then testing those predictions.

In this version of the system, instead of providing the motions and behaviors of the virtual gorillas that the students interact with, the students build the motions and behavior controllers themselves, based on their observations of the actual gorillas at the zoo. The controllers and motions that the students build are then plugged into the current virtual gorilla system, and students become virtual gorillas and test the verisimilitude of their models by trying out different stimuli on their gorilla models to see how they react.

Instead of making VR the centerpiece of a student's learning experience as the first system did, this system uses it as one of a se t of tools that enhance a student's learning experience. The student makes observations of real gorillas to gain the knowledge needed to model motions or behaviors correctly. They then work together in groups on computers translating their observations into models that are in a form that the virtual gorilla system can understand. Finally, they use VR as the most natural tool to test

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their models, by interacting with them to see if they react as their observations predict the should. This seems to be a better shot term model for using VR in education since it doesn't require students to have continual access to an expensive technology, and it focuses on acquiring skills that are generally applicable in life instead of specific content.

Figure 3. The Motion Modeling Interface

This new version of the system required modification of the current virtual gorilla system, as well as the construction of some new tools for the students to use. Although a large part of the current virtual gorilla system is modular and controlled b external data files, tile details of the behavior control system at the lowest level are coded in C, something that it is unreasonable for middle school students to master over the six week period of Zoo Atlanta's typical Young Scientists program! The curren version of the program is being modified to accept behavior controllers expressed in a simple scripting language that should be easier for the students to work with.

In addition, the motion modeling tool has been updated and an easy to use interface has been created for it so that students can easily modify motions that already exist in the system or add new motions to it. Users can control joint angles by moving sliders, one for each degree of freedom in the model. Individual poses can be modified, new poses can be created, or existing poses can be removed. As can be seen from Figure 3, different body parts are colored different colors to make them easily distinguishable when one occludes another.

The process a student goes through to generate a new motion involves three different parts, First the student must create the motion as a set of poses to be cycled through, using the motion modeling system, Once this is done, the student must specify which motions can transition to this motion, and to which motions this one can transition. This is necessary since, for instance, i looks strange and is physically unrealistic to interpolate directl from a lying position to a walking one. To look natural, the sequence should be lying to sitting to standing to walking. The transition table specifies the state machine that controls allowable motion interpolations. Finally, the higher level behavior controller must be specified to control when the virtual gorillas perform the new motions. For now this is done by a simple rule- based system in which preconditions are tested sequentially unti one is satisfied, and then that corresponding action is performed.

Allowing students to croat their own controllers and motions will also hetp the original implementation of the system. since it will provide a larger repertoire of motions and behaviors that can be used in the system where the student just explores and interacts with pre-scripted behaviors,

4.1 Preliminary Testing A preliminary version of the second system was tested last

summer at the zoo, using students from one of their summer camps. These camps are a week tong, and the camp theme vm'ies from week to week and by age group, Pilot tes ting of the new system was done by a group of middle school kids whose camp theme was animal behaviors.

Students attended camp from 9AM to 4PM Monday through Friday. tn addition to studying animal behaviors, they had a to of other activities scheduled, including visits from several animals, tours of behind-the-scenes areas at the zoo, presentations b keepers ~md other employees on what their jobs entailed, etc. The behavior modeling part was structured around the normal camp schedule by the camp director with input from team members. Students spent the first three days making observations of the actval gorillas at the zoo, learning how to do timed behavioral observations as well as observing various interactions, taking note of what actions were perfor ed and trying to determine the interaction triggers. Students also had awdlable video tapes of their various interaction types for additional study, which helped them with more infrequent interactions.

Action modeling started late Wednesday and Continued into Thursday: Thursday afternoon students developed behavior rules based on their observations, which were inco~orated intothe system for them to test on Friday. The students were divided into four groups and each group was assigned a type of action locomotion, social behavior, foraginJfeeding, and solitar belaavior. There were four students in each group, working in two team, s of two students. Students were able to use the motion modeling interface to generate their own poses. For testing purposes it was assumed that any pose they generated could be directly transitioned to or fi'om by any other pose. Since the behavior control specification system was still being developed, the students were given the predicates they could use and the format of the rules they shoukl generate, and were asked to just write their rules down on paper, These were then collected, and translated into C code Thursday night so that the students could test their initial system in toto using the HMD on Friday.

4.2 Observations and Preliminary Results While the overall idea sounded great, the implementation left

a bit to be desired. At the end of the week, the Students had produced gorillas that breakdanced, and godllas thatdid synchronized bobsledding. These were intended to be resting motions and foraging motions, so obviously there were a few glitches that the students needed to work on. Unfommately, the ran out of time betbre having a chance to revise their mOtionS and behaviors, due in part to having spent so much of the first part of the week making observations, to the point of boredom and frustration. However, even t h o u g h tile students had some problems with this second version of the system, their overal experiences were positive, and pointed out several areas to t arget for improvement while refining it.

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4.2.1 Positive Results One quite obvious result was that the students were

fascinated by the technology, and couldn't wait to get to use it. Even though computers are becoming more common now in schools and homes, the h ead-mounted display was still novel enough that students looked for excuses to use it. In -fact, some of the more intelligent, energetic students would put the HMD on even if it was turned off! This enthusiasm kept the students motivated even through some of the less exciting parts of the program, such as making actual animal observations. We also saw this enthusiasm from the users of the first version of the system, and this augers well for using VR as an educational tool, since you have to get a student's attention and get him excited before you can teach him anything. However, it was obvious that the system needed some major redesign before it was ready for general use.

4.2.2 Lessons Learned The first obvious change needed was a reorganization of the

schedule of events. In the pilot camp, the students did all their observations the first part of the week and their modeling at the end of the week. A better approach would have been to have the students mix the two activities together, so that after making so e observations, they would try to model what they had observed. This would give them an idea of the types of things they should have been paying attention to, so that when they went back for the next round of observations, they could do a much more informed job of data collection. Instead, the kids were getting bored by the second day with just going and watching gorillas for hours, and when they finally got to try to generate their motion poses, they discovered that they hadn't paid attention to particular things they needed to know to model their set of motions correctly.

It also turned out that the process of generating a series of poses that will produce a desired motion pattern when played back was a difficult one for the students to grasp. They had problems determining what kinds of poses would make good keyframes, generating the desired motion via the interpolation process. After not getting anything useable done the first day, we had them start all over again the second day with another brief explanation of the process. In addition, before letting the actually use the motion modeling software, they had to generate their poses using pipe cleaners, to show that they understood the process and had reasonable ideas for each pose. Even with that, though, there were still enough "gotchas" with motion modeling that no student ended up with realistic-looking motions.

Another problem with the motion modeling software was that to use it, the user needed to start at the torso (center of mass) and work out from there, positioning the more extremal bod parts after positioning the proximal ones. However, the mindset of the students was such that they persisted in wanting to start at the feet and work up. This led to frustration since after they had the fee perfectly placed, they would try to rotate the torso, and the feet would move.

Rule specification brought with it its own set of challenges. First, the language they were given had limited expressivity, and in fact finding a language for the production rules that is both easy enough to understand and use that middle school students can work with it, but at the same time is expressive enough that i

carl capture the full range of gorilla behaviors is still an open problem. This problem was compounded by allowing the students to write their rules down on paper. We ended up with rules like "1) The first time you meet up with a juvenile gorilla not a silverback" as a rule for specifying when to do a social exam, and "1) Facing-Walk to the food and do gathering" as a rule for foraging. The students evidently needed a more restrictive system for rule specification to constrain them to the types of specifications that the behavior control system could understand and use.

Table 1. Behavior Rules Syntax (first version) Predicates: Facing(object, value)

Near(object, value)

Random(value)

Hungry(value

Tired(value)

Dominate(object) Objects: Food Toy

Gorilla Rules: If predicatel0

True if object is within value degrees of front True if object is within value meters True if random number between 0 and 1 is less than value True if hunger (between 0 and 1) is greater than vaoue True if fatigue (between 0 and 1) is greater than value True if object is submissive

Any edible ite Stick or other object Another gorilla

Then motion~

manipulable

If predicaten0 Then motionn

Finally, the problem of specifying acceptable transitions was ignored in the interest of time, and because it would involve explaining the internals of the VR gorilla system to the students in a lot more detail than they were ready for. However, this is an important part of specifying a gorilla behavior, and so we are working on an easy to use interface that will let the students specify transitions for their new motions without overloading them with details.

5. CONCLUSIONS Given the fact that computers are just now becoming

widespread in schools, and even then there are only two or three per classroom in many schools, it seems reasonable to expect that VR won't show up in the classroom for ten years or more. However, as the Virtual Gorilla project has shown, there is a place for VR now in such educational institutions as zoos, science and technology museums, and other similar public places. When deploying a system, care should be taken to insure that the application truly benefits from VR in some way.

While VR can be used to teach concepts, such systems have a chicken and egg proble ---it takes a lot of time and effort to generate enough content to make a system that teaches concepts worth while. This content is not feasible to generate until there are enough systems deployed to make the effort economicall viable, but until such content becomes readily available, few VR

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systems will be deployed to teach content. Because of this, mos likely the first systems to be successfully deployed wilt focus on broad methods rather than specific concepts.

Finally, it appears that there are educational applications of VR in which the technology is the centerpiece, but there ~ue other equally useful applications that make effective use of VR as just one part of the learning environment. This type of application seems to have the most utility for the near future as the price of the hardware continues to drop and VR systems become more readily available.

For those interested in the results we obtain or looking for more information about the project, be sure to visit the project web site, ht~p//, www.cc.,,atech:edu/igfads/~dDon.Atlison?/g/~orilla/.

6. A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S Thanks to all the people at Zoo Atlanta who ha ve patienti

answered questions and tested versions of the system :for us, Special thanks go to gorilla experts Loft Perkins, Kristen Lukas and Kyle Burks for their help in keeping the system grounded in reality. Thanks also to Ken Hay and the education specialists at Zoo Atlanta (Bert, Beth, Angela, Michelle, and Meredith, among others) who are working with us on the second generation of the virtual gorilla to make sure that it is grounded in good pedagog and to assist us in a more formal evaluation of this next version,

Finally, thanks to Zoo Atlanta and the Center{br Educational Technology at Georgia Tech for providing initial funding for this project..

7. REFERENCES [1] Allison, D., B. Wills, D. Bowman, L. F. [-lodges and J.

Wineman, "The Virtual Reality Gorilla Exhibit," IEEE

Computer Graphics and AtLplications, 30-38 (November/December 1997).

[211 Brelsford, J., "Physics Education in a Virtual Enviromnent," Proceedings ~'the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 37 ~ Annual Meeting, 1286-1290 ( t 993).

[3] Byme, C., "V rtual Reality and Education," Technical Report HITL Report Number TR-93-6, University of Washington HIT Lab (1993).

[4] Dede, C.. M. Salzm~m, and B. Loftin, "ScienceSpace: Virtu~d Realities for Learning Complex and Abstract Scientific Concepts," Proceedings c~f the IEEE 1996 Virtual Reality Annual bzrernational Symposium, 246-252 (March/April 1996).

[5] Johnson, A., T. Moher, S. Ohlsson, and M. Gitlingham, "The Round Ear~ Project-Collaborative VR tbr Conceptual Learning," IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications, 19(6), 60-69 (November/December 1999).

[6] Johnson, A,, M. Roussos, J. Leigh, C. Vasilakis, C, Barnes, and T. fvloher, "The NICE Project: Learning Together in a Virtual World?' Proceedings, IEEE 1998 Virtual Reality Annual htternational Symposium, 176-183 (March 1998)..

[7] Winn, W., "The Virtual Reality Roving Vehicle Project," ZH.E. Journal, 70-74 (December 1995).

[8] Winn, W., and W. Bricken, "Designing Virtual Worlds tbr Use in Mathematics Education: The Example of Experiential Algebra," Educational Technology, 12-19 (December 1992),

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