MIS Knowledge Base
3-D Technology Opens Up New Worlds for Research, Teaching
by Nancy Almand
The heart of this technology is the ability to supply a shared space for people that facilitates collaboration and communication.
IMAGINE LEARNING ABOUT THE POWER OF TORNADOES by transporting yourself to a three-dimensional virtual world where you explore how these natural forces affect different buildings. Or picture yourself in a virtual art gallery where you can view exhibitions and chat in real time with visitors from around the world.
Students in Assistant Professor Katy Borner's L578 User Interface Design Class created these virtual worlds last fall for faculty interested in exploring the use of 3-D technology for research and teaching. Borner offered the service, dubbed the Design Deal, for a second time this fall.
The Design Deal is just one component of IU's Collaborative Information Universe, or iUni, administered by SLIS and University Information Technology Services. The goal of iUni is to provide a 3-D, web-based collaborative tool for faculty, staff, and students on all eight IU campuses.
The powerful 3-D program was developed by Active Worlds Technology, which allows for the creation of many worlds for general and educational purposes. The SLIS-UITS venture, is using the Active Worlds software hosted on a smaller server at the Advanced Visualization Lab on the Bloomington campus, and is dedicated for the development of IU 3-D projects.
In iUni, users can create their own 3-D worlds or participate as iUni citizens in existing worlds. The virtual worlds can be used for classroom exercises and for visual data exploration in real time.
3-D worlds are mushrooming these days, accompanied by the rise of faster computers and better networks. Even non-programmers can easily use 3-D online browser systems. Borner notes that "once people see how easy it is to access, navigate, and build in these worlds then they get really interested."
The prototypes developed by the students in Borner's class are created with "real world" value. Project proposals by intrested faculty include information about the anticipated user group, why the 3-D approach would be advantageous, and the number of potential users over the next two years. Students then have the opportunity to design, develop, implement, and evaluate one 3-D world of their choice in collaboration with their clients.
Borner feels that the heart of this technology is the ability to supply a shared space for people that facilitates collaboration and communication.
"The 3-D environment allows for the exploration of new concepts and learning theories," she says.
This can be useful when people are not linked physically and also enhances the educational component by furnishing a place to practice skills as they are learned. It moves learning into a dynamic and evolving sphere. The technology is multi-modal and utilizes text, image, sound, and movement.
In addition to the L578 projects, Borner and students from SLIS, computer science, and instructional systems technology are developing the Memory Palace, a repository for online documents to be used by faculty and students at SLIS. It will provide thousands of links to online resources, including images, documents, and web pages, in a shared environment. Users can interact with each other and the online documents.
Borner describes the Memory Palace as a place where the "community's collective knowledge can be accessed, learned from, contributed to, and built upon."
To process the large amounts of data available in the Memory Palace World, a technique called data mining is used.
Cluster analysis is applied to retrieve, organize, and analyze data into more useful units. Users will find it easier to examine information that is spatially organized in forms of clusters -- each cluster containing documents relevant to a certain topic -- and to browse through huge amounts of material using a map of topics as a guide.
For more information on these projects, including a free browser download to participate in 3-D worlds, visit the following web sites:
o http://vw.indiana.edu/
o http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~katy/L578/deal.html
o http://avl.iu.edu/Or consider attending the International Symposium on Collaborative Information Visualization Environments at the 6th International Conference on Information Visualization, London, UK, July 2002:
o http://vw.indiana.edu/cive02/
Posted December 12, 2001