scholarly journals STEM education in semi-virtual interactive environment

Author(s):  
Danny Xie Li ◽  
Esteban Jiménez Valverde ◽  
Esteban Arias Méndez

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced us to change the way we used to handle education in our homes, through sanitary restrictions that seek to prohibit or reduce physical contact, moving from the traditional way to a virtual methodology; reason for which we must look for new solutions to adapt to this new teaching strategy. In addition, the pandemic has accelerated the arrival of the 4.0 revolution or technological revolution, where new challenges arise for society. The above reasons serve to justify and encourage that STEM education cannot stop. However, given the crisis we are experiencing and the solutions provided, the excessive use of virtual environments can affect areas such as psychological, social, etc. Through this project, a learning model implemented through volunteers is proposed, based on an interactive semi-virtual environment, where the participant can interact synchronously with a volunteering model provided by the volunteer tutor, and the learning process is supported through workshops and the use of virtual tools.

Author(s):  
Erika deJong ◽  
Dave Chodos ◽  
Pawel Kuras ◽  
Patricia Boechler ◽  
Eleni Stroulia ◽  
...  

Virtual interactive environments such as Second Life are emerging as innovative tools that can support and enhance learning in various educational domains. However, for the educational practitioner new to these environments, developing educational settings and activities in a virtual environment can appear to be technically complex and beyond their area of expertise. This case study describes some of the technical challenges encountered and the solutions derived during the development of a virtual world for the delivery of a health science interprofessional communications course.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Giesel ◽  
Anna Nowakowska ◽  
Julie M. Harris ◽  
Constanze Hesse

AbstractWhen we use virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) environments to investigate behaviour or train motor skills, we expect that the insights or skills acquired in VR/AR transfer to real-world settings. Motor behaviour is strongly influenced by perceptual uncertainty and the expected consequences of actions. VR/AR differ in both of these aspects from natural environments. Perceptual information in VR/AR is less reliable than in natural environments, and the knowledge of acting in a virtual environment might modulate our expectations of action consequences. Using mirror reflections to create a virtual environment free of perceptual artefacts, we show that hand movements in an obstacle avoidance task systematically differed between real and virtual obstacles and that these behavioural differences occurred independent of the quality of the available perceptual information. This suggests that even when perceptual correspondence between natural and virtual environments is achieved, action correspondence does not necessarily follow due to the disparity in the expected consequences of actions in the two environments.


Author(s):  
Kay M. Stanney ◽  
Kelly S. Kingdon ◽  
Robert S. Kennedy

Are current virtual environments (VEs) usable by the broad spectrum of people who may wish to utilize this technology? The current study, which examined over 1000 participants, indicates the answer to this question is a definitive ‘no’. Virtual environment exposure was found to cause people to vomit (1.1%), experience nausea (71%), disorientation (70%), and oculomotor disturbances (79%). Overall, 88% of participants reported some level of adverse symptomatology, ranging from a minor headache to vomiting and intense vertigo. These disturbances led 12% of those exposed to prematurely cease their interaction. Dropout rates as high as nearly 50% were found in exposures of 1 hr in length. In addition, long-term aftereffects were found, including headaches, drowsiness, nausea, and fatigue. These problems could substantially reduce the accessibility of VE technology by the general public and thus must be resolved if this technology is to be widely adopted.


1994 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Bricken ◽  
Geoffrey Coco

The Virtual Environment Operating Shell (veos) was developed at University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Laboratory as software infrastructure for the lab's research in virtual environments. veos was designed from scratch to provide a comprehensive and unified management facility to support generation of, interaction with, and maintenance of virtual environments. VEOS emphasizes rapid prototyping, heterogeneous distributed computing, and portability. We discuss the design, philosophy and implementation of veos in depth. Within the Kernel, the shared database transformations are pattern-directed, communications are asynchronous, and the programmer's interface is LISP. An entity-based metaphor extends object-oriented programming to systems-oriented programming. Entities provide first-class environments and biological programming constructs such as perceive, react, and persist. The organization, structure, and programming of entities are discussed in detail. The article concludes with a description of the applications that have contributed to the iterative refinement of the VEOS software.


2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (122) ◽  
pp. 20160414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mehdi Moussaïd ◽  
Mubbasir Kapadia ◽  
Tyler Thrash ◽  
Robert W. Sumner ◽  
Markus Gross ◽  
...  

Understanding the collective dynamics of crowd movements during stressful emergency situations is central to reducing the risk of deadly crowd disasters. Yet, their systematic experimental study remains a challenging open problem due to ethical and methodological constraints. In this paper, we demonstrate the viability of shared three-dimensional virtual environments as an experimental platform for conducting crowd experiments with real people. In particular, we show that crowds of real human subjects moving and interacting in an immersive three-dimensional virtual environment exhibit typical patterns of real crowds as observed in real-life crowded situations. These include the manifestation of social conventions and the emergence of self-organized patterns during egress scenarios. High-stress evacuation experiments conducted in this virtual environment reveal movements characterized by mass herding and dangerous overcrowding as they occur in crowd disasters. We describe the behavioural mechanisms at play under such extreme conditions and identify critical zones where overcrowding may occur. Furthermore, we show that herding spontaneously emerges from a density effect without the need to assume an increase of the individual tendency to imitate peers. Our experiments reveal the promise of immersive virtual environments as an ethical, cost-efficient, yet accurate platform for exploring crowd behaviour in high-risk situations with real human subjects.


1998 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
René Verry

Susan Lederman (SL) is an invited member of the International Council of Research Fellows for the Braille Research Center and a Fellow of he Canadian Psychology Association. She was also an Associate of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Programme for 8 years. A Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Computing & Information Science at Queen's University at Kingston (Ontario, Canada), she has written and coauthored numerous articles on tactile psychophysics, haptic perception and cognition, motor control, and haptic applications in robotics, teleoperation, and virtual environments. She is currently the coorganizer of the Annual Symposium a Haptic Interfaces for Teleoperation and Virtual Environment Systems. René Verry (RV) is a psychology professor at Millikin University (Decatur, IL), where she teaches a variety of courses in the experimental core, including Sensation and Perception. She chose the often-subordinated somatic senses as the focus of her interview, and recruited Susan Lederman as our research specialist.


Author(s):  
Randall Spain ◽  
Benjamin Goldberg ◽  
Jeffrey Hansberger ◽  
Tami Griffith ◽  
Jeremy Flynn ◽  
...  

Recent advances in technology have made virtual environments, virtual reality, augmented reality, and simulations more affordable and accessible to researchers, companies, and the general public, which has led to many novel use cases and applications. A key objective of human factors research and practice is determining how these technology-rich applications can be designed and applied to improve human performance across a variety of contexts. This session will demonstrate some of the distinct and diverse uses of virtual environments and mixed reality environments in an alternative format. The session will begin with each demonstrator providing a brief overview of their virtual environment (VE) and a description of how it has been used to address a particular problem or research need. Following the description portion of the session, each VE will be set-up at a demonstration station in the room, and session attendees will be encouraged to directly interact with the virtual environment and ask demonstrators questions about their research and inquire about the effectiveness of using VE for research, training, and evaluation purposes. The overall objective of this alternative session is to increase the awareness of how human factors professionals use VE technologies and increase the awareness of the capabilities and limitations of VE in supporting the work of HF professionals.


2019 ◽  
Vol 01 (01) ◽  
pp. 24-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Smys S ◽  
Jennifer S. Raj ◽  
Krishna raj N.

Virtual reality (VR) technology has the potential to make a person experience anything, anytime, anywhere. It has the ability to influence the human brain that it assumes to be present somewhere that it is really not. In this paper, we exploit this application of the VR technology to simulate virtual environments that can help with PTSD therapy for people affected by trauma due to accident, war, sexual abuse and so on. Several sensors are used to gather the user movements on a motion platform and replicate it in the virtual environment with the help of a Raspberry Pi board and Unreal Developer’s kit. It has flexible interfaces that the clinician can modify the virtual environment according to the requirement for the patient.


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 30-57
Author(s):  
Shamima Yasmin

This paper conducts an extensive survey on existing Virtual Reality (VR)-based rehabilitation approaches in the context of different types of impairments: mobility, cognitive, and visual. Some VR-based assistive technologies involve repetitions of body movements, some require persistent mental exercise, while some work as sensory substitution systems. A multi-modal VR-based environment can incorporate a number of senses, (i.e., visual, auditory, or haptic) into the system and can be an immense source of motivation and engagement in comparison with traditional rehabilitation therapy. This survey categorizes virtual environments on the basis of different available modalities. Each category is again subcategorized by the types of impairments while introducing available devices and interfaces. Before concluding the survey, the paper also briefly focuses on some issues with existing VR-based approaches that need to be optimized to exploit the utmost benefit of virtual environment-based rehabilitation systems .


Research has shown that a large portion of healthcare cost is due to medical errors. There are many factors that cause medical errors but one major factor is linked to healthcare professionals who are not adequately trained with the appropriate skills. Virtual environments and simulations are being used to help improve training in many different areas, including the healthcare profession. This paper explores the usage of Second Life in healthcare education and its ability to improve patient safety. The conclusion is that much progress and development still needs to be made before Second Life will make a significant impact on improved patient safety through healthcare education. There is a need to make the virtual environment more realistic to adequately train healthcare professionals.


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