A Collaborative Educational Virtual Environment
Clint Jeffery
jeffery@cs.nmsu.edu
Virtual Communities
- a killer application of the present day
- evolved from video games, chat rooms, MUDs
- collaborative virtual reality on standard hardware
- I first became interested due to EverQuest(tm)
- ~2000 Net users in an entire virtual world in glorious 3D
- Cities, wilderness, dungeons, moons; thousands of objects
- Travel, fight, cook, "train", cast spells, and CHAT
- Runs acceptably even on modems
What are Virtual Communities Good For?
- For me, EverQuest solves a "distance" problem
- I can play with family in Seattle and Portland
- What "serious" domains have a distance problem?
"distance" to overcome...or to maintain!
- Education
- Software Engineering
- Match.com
- ...?
- Entrepreneurial opportunity: identify domains and apply this killer
application to the many areas that will benefit from it.
- Research opportunity: reduce the cost of building new VC's
NMSU's Virtual Computer Science Department
- What works so well for gaming just has to be useful for distance learning
- Can solve my "midnight office hour" problem, not just the
student-in-Carlsbad problem
- Testing this hypothesis with an $840,000 NSF education grant
- We will build, literally, a 3D model of our department
- Including collaborative editors, compilers, debuggers...
- Far fewer objects and simpler graphics than EQ
- Real time audio; "cartoon videophone"
- Consortium of NMSU, NNMCC, CIT, NMSU-Grants, NMSU-Carlsbad
What We've Done in Our First Year-and-a-Half
- Many students answered a volunteer call, many more offered to
help for money
- Went from demos that modeled one room (SH 167), "avatars",
networking (chat), and audio support... to a prototype that
almost does most of what is needed.
- Identified performance bottlenecks, improved scalability to
"class-size".
- Explored and evaluated of many off-the-shelf resources
- Collected Science Hall 1st floor model data, textures
- Website at
http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~jeffery/vcsc/
- Naturally, we need more help!