Using 3D Virtual Worlds Integrated to Remote Experimentation in Sciences Teaching

This project seeks to demonstrate the use of remote experimentation and 3D virtual environments applied to the teaching-learning in the areas of exact sciences-physics. In proposing the combination of remote experimentation and 3D virtual worlds in teaching-learning process, we intend to achieve greater geographic coverage, contributing to the construction of new methodologies of teaching support, speed of access and foremost motivation for students to continue in scientific study of the technology areas. The proposed architecture is based on a model implemented fully featured open source and open hardware. The virtual world was built in OpenSim software and integrated it a remote physics experiment called “electrical panel”. Accessing the virtual world the user has total control of the experiment within the 3D virtual world.

Purpose– This paper examines the three-dimensional (3D)virtual world users’ perceptions of authenticity and trustworthiness in the virtual prototypes and users’ potential purchase behavior in the real-world settings. The 3D virtual worlds provide a new platform that exhibits virtual prototypes as a promotion channel for new products of real-world and online service, where users can communicate “face to face” via their representative avatars.Design/methodology/approach– The authors conducted an experiment in Second Life and collected data in a post-study questionnaire to test our proposed conceptual model. Structural equation modeling was the main methodology.Findings– The research results showed that 3D virtual world users obtained a high sense of telepresence and social presence. The sense of telepresence positively leads to users’ perceptions of online trust in the virtual prototypes and thus increases their intention to purchase real-world objects; the users’ sense of social presence positively associates to their perceptions of authenticity and online trust and, therefore, their purchase intention.Research limitations/implications– In survey research, the common method variance is a problem. A more robust way is to use objective measures.Practical implications– A new channel was proposed for businesses to enhance their online strategies that will increase their business value.Social implications– 3D virtual world is also a cutting-edge platform for remote education, public information service, etc.Originality/value– This paper initially contributes to the literature that interprets underlying factors in 3D virtual worlds associated to purchase intention in real-world objects. We demonstrated the advantages, i.e. the communication efficacy and vivid virtual design in the 3D user-generated environment.

This work describes the development of a 3D virtual world with remote experimentation applied to Science teaching. The student, using avatars, can explore the virtual world and interact with a remote lab which shows images captured from a real microscope, with samples of roots, stalks and leafs.

3D virtual worlds are networked environments designed using the metaphor of architecture. Recent developments in 3D virtual worlds focus on interactivity, flexibility and adaptability. Rather than creating virtual environments in which the objects have intelligent behaviours, our research takes a different approach to develop an agent model that is associated with an individual person in the 3D virtual world as a personal design agent. This paper presents a Generative Design Agent (GDA), a kind of rational agent capable of representing a person in a virtual world and designing, implementing and demolishing 3D virtual places based on the occupants’ current needs in the virtual world. The core of a GDA’s design component is a generative design grammar that is able to capture a style of 3D virtual worlds. 3D virtual worlds designed using the GDA model is another kind of architecture for the “moment”.

This paper discusses aspects of Information and Communications Technologies and how they have influenced our daily lives, especially our educational models. Despite the technological advances, the lack of interest of young people for science and technology careers increases and it is even more worsened by the fact that an extremely small number of schools have science and computer labs in Brazil. Moreover, some educational models have emerged in last decades contributing to teaching and learning process, and we discuss especially those which include remote experimentation and 3D virtual worlds, whose goal is to provide immersive learning environment with real experiments for students.

Within most architecture and design schools, 3D virtual worlds are traditionally perceived and used as a CAAD tool for modelling and collaboration. Building on the understanding of virtual worlds as the extension of our physical environments where people can inhabit and participate in a variety of activities, we teach designing virtual worlds as a design subject which considers 3D virtual worlds as a different kind of environment design other than a technical tool for supporting design simulation and collaboration. This paper reports on our teaching experience, as well as discusses the principles for designing and teaching in 3D virtual worlds.

On the Web and on informatics systems, 3D virtual worlds used become big both in number and in size. Therefore, we propose in this paper a new method for retrieving 3D virtual worlds based on the semantics and the content. Firstly, we propose a new classified database of 3D virtual worlds given in VRML format. To achieve the semantic method, we construct an ontology that describes virtual worlds in various aspects including their contents (3D objects building a virtual world) and information about their contents (authors, file format, etc). This ontology is presented by OWL, the W3C recommended language. So as to extract desired 3D scenes from the proposed database we use the SPARQL query language. We propose finally a shape based method for searching desired virtual worlds by content in this database. This method is based on a new distance (metric) that define the similarity between virtual worlds. This method is evaluated using the recall vs. precision curves.

The proliferation of the Internet and other technological innovations has transformed the structure of the tourism industry as well as affected how tourism destinations are perceived and consumed. The 3D virtual world provides opportunities for destination marketing organizations to communicate with targeted markets by offering a rich environment for potential visitors to explore tourism destinations. However, as of yet, there is little understanding about how to effectively market tourism destinations to virtual world participants who are technology users as well as potential consumers. The purpose of the present study is to develop a research framework that integrates the technology acceptance model (TAM) and self‐determination theory to understand how tourists use a 3D virtual world. Primary data were obtained for this study through self‐administered Web questionnaires. The data were conducted in a laboratory setting with 186 participants. This study contributes to the empirical TAM literature by applying the model to a 3D virtual tourism site. Additionally, this study provides a research framework to capture the entertainment nature of a 3D virtual world by extending the TAM to incorporate psychological elements of self‐determination theory to understand consumer experience. From the perspective of tourism professionals, this study contributes to an understanding of how best to construct informative and interactive tourist destinations in 3D virtual worlds to attract potential online and real‐world tourists. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In this paper, a learning environment for mechatronics training is proposed, which combines immersive 3D worlds and real lab equipment. A key feature of the system is the tight coupling between virtual and real mechatronics by implementing a system, which allows interfacing an immersive 3D World with physical sensors and actuators. A communication link between a microcontroller and a virtual mechatronics device is available. The virtual system is modeled in OpenSimulator and users are able to control mechatronics hardware via a 3D virtual environment and vice versa. The proposed solution opens interoperability both with local and remote lab devices. This includes remote experimentation in which all lab equipment is real and accessible via the Internet, but also examples in which real devices interact with simulation models created in a 3D virtual world. The concept is open for further enhancements.

Over the past three years (2006–2008), the medical/health and public health communities have shown a growing interest in using online 3D virtual worlds like Second Life® (http://secondlife.com/) for health education, community outreach, training and simulations purposes. 3D virtual worlds are seen as the precursors of ‘Web 3D’, the next major iteration of the Internet that will follow in the coming years. This paper provides a tour of several flagship Web 3D experiences in Second Life®, including Play2Train Islands (emergency preparedness training), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—CDC Island (public health), Karuna Island (AIDS support and information), Tox Town at Virtual NLM Island (US National Library of Medicine - environmental health), and Jefferson’s Occupational Therapy Center. We also discuss the potential and future of Web 3D. These are still early days of 3D virtual worlds, and there are still many more untapped potentials and affordances of 3D virtual worlds that are yet to be explored, as the technology matures further and improves over the coming months and years.

Although teachers play an important role in preventing school bullying, there is a lack of educational programs to enhance the competencies of pre-service teachers regarding how to prevent and address school bullying. To improve the knowledge and self-efficacy of pre-service teachers about school-bullying challenges, this study developed an authentic problem solving activity in a 3D virtual world on the basis of activity theory. In this study, for four weeks, 36 pre-service teachers collaboratively solved school-bullying problems, conducted role-plays in a virtual world, and reflected on their activities. As a result, the participants significantly improved their knowledge (restorative justice) and self-efficacy to handle school bullying. This study also investigated the pre-service teachers’ perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of the activity through analyzing quantitative and qualitative data with an activity system framework. The findings were discussed to improve the design of the problem-solving activity in the context of Korean pre-service teacher education.

For many millions of users, 3D virtual worlds provide an engaging, immersive experience heightened by a synergistic combination of visual realism with dynamic control of the user’s movement within the virtual world. For individuals with visual or dexterity impairments, however, one or both of those synergistic elements are impacted, reducing the usability and therefore the utility of the 3D virtual world. This article considers what features are necessary to make virtual worlds usable by such individuals. Empirical work has been based on a multiplayer 3D virtual world game called PowerUp, to which we have built in an extensive set of accessibility features. These features include in-world navigation and orientation tools, font customization, self-voicing text-to-speech output, key remapping options, and keyboard-only and mouse-only navigation. Through empirical work with legally blind teenagers and adults with cerebral palsy, these features have been refined and validated. Whereas accessibility support for users with visual impairment often revolves around keyboard navigation, these studies emphasized the need to support visual aspects of pointing device actions too. Other notable findings include use of speech to supplement sound effects for novice users, and, for those with cerebral palsy, a general preference to use a pointing device to look around the world, rather than keys or on-screen buttons. The PowerUp accessibility features provide a core level of accessibility for the user groups studied.

The development of an educational 3D virtual world requires a complex skillset, which includes programming, modeling, texturing, animating, and quest/level designing. When these skills are distributed across multiple workers, the workers must negotiate a shared understanding of their intermediate work products, which ultimately culminate in the virtual world. This paper is an ethnography of the intermediate work products (“artifacts”) and processes used in the development of Virtual Energy World—a 3D virtual world for instruction on sustainable energy issues. The resulting artifacts and processes have utility as a general development framework for both educational virtual worlds and video games.

In this paper we present a system that automatically generates a 3D virtual world from a virtual institution (VI) specification, namely of activities that will take place in the virtual world. A virtual institution is an interaction environment where both human and software agents participate in a joint 3D virtual world. A VI is visualized as a 3D building composed of rooms representing the different activities defined in its specification. To support the generation of the 3D scene, we propose an extension of shape grammars called virtual world grammar (VWG). A VWG incorporates information about the definition of the activities, properties of the different shapes (i.e spaces), functions to evaluate and validate the generated design, and a set of heuristics to guide the generation process. A definition and execution of Virtual World Grammars and a 3D transformation mechanism are integrated in a so called Virtual World Builder Toolkit (VWBT).

Hybrid systems such as those that combine 3D virtual worlds and organization based multiagent systems add new visual and communication features for multiuser applications. The design of such hybrid and dynamic systems is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a system that can automatically generate a 3D virtual world (VW) from an organization based multiagent system (MAS) specification that establishes the activities participants can engage on. Both shape grammar and virtual world paradigms inspired us to propose a Virtual World Grammar (VWG) to support the generation process of a virtual world design. A VWG includes semantic information about both MAS specification and shape grammar elements. This information, along with heuristics and validations, guides the VW generation producing functional designs. To support the definition and execution of a Virtual World Grammar, we have developed a so named Virtual World Builder Toolkit (VWBT). We illustrate this process by generating a 3D visualization of a virtual institution from its specification.