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Abstract
The paper shows how the Merseygrid project in Liverpool has taken the
best features of virtual reality gaming software to develop interactive
and creative educational experiences that are currently being piloted
with 120 primary and secondary schools in the Merseyside area and will
discuss potential collaboration with teachers and schools in Dublin and
elsewhere in Ireland. The challenge for learning in a digital age has
been to provide the classroom learner with a high-tech learning environment
that compares in quality with home gaming environments but is available
on an educational budget. The paper examines the development of immersive
and flat-screen Virtual Reality educational applications, the principles
informing such software and the current use of collaborative learning
software and networked VR in educational and heritage contexts.
Virtual Reality Gaming application software-origins
In the early 1990s a Leicester-based company called “Virtuality”
set the standard for immersive virtual reality gaming environments, rapidly
developing from what had been a university-based research project into
a company with 120 employees and offices in Leicester, Japan and the USA.
The founder members of the company, with design, flight simulation, Artificial
Intelligence and astrophysics backgrounds, had hoped that the integrated
VR system they had put together would be used in the fields of education,
medicine or creative arts, but funding could only be obtained from the
games industry who saw immersive headset-based VR as an exciting arcade
game attractor.
Hollywood enthusiastically seized on the concept of virtual reality and
made films like “Lawnmower Man” and “Disclosure”,
showing lifelike animated VR worlds and detailed interactive interiors
which could not at that time be produced within VR software, where high
realism inevitably meant extremely limited interactivity and interaction
meant low-resolution blocky images. Although game players enjoyed the
ability to shoot, drive and role-play in 360 degree headset based environments,
casual users thought that VR was over-hyped and the initial enthusiasm
for the medium waned.
Cost was also a prohibitive factor, VR systems costing some £60,000
in 1991 and still £30,000 or so by 1995. In 1998 a company called
Educality was set up by two founder members of Virtuality and a languages
teacher to investigate the possibilities of using games quality software
to produce educational and heritage applications for the software.
The Merseygrid Project-origins
Merseygrid is a Liverpool-based company which has emerged from a series
of government and European regeneration initiatives to provide integrated
ICT support on Merseyside and beyond .The ICL-supported initiative, Bristol
on-line, was one of the prototype projects for what later became the National
Grid for Learning in the UK and from 1996 onwards the Project leader supervised
the Meon and Primary Step projects in Liverpool, initiatives which provide
educational and community -based ICT initiatives to schools and other
organisations across the Merseyside region. The project team consists
of a mixture of IT specialists and technicians, sales and marketing people
and teachers, whose specialist subject and pedagogical knowledge informs
the software and support that are offered to schools. Currently there
are about 150 schools signed up to Merseygrid, which offers them an integrated
package of support, New Opportunities IT Training and assistance in implementing
new technologies, such as interactive whiteboards, whole class story telling
sessions using Flash animations and virtual reality.
VR for educational applications on Merseyside
In February 2000, Merseygrid started using Leicester-developed VR to provide
immersive headset-based experiences for all school students in the project.
The team decided they wanted cheap and easily accessible CD-Rom flat-screen
VR and worked with colleagues in Leicester to develop a generic multi-purpose
VR experience with a user-friendly Windows-based interface. The principles
behind “Creative VR” and “Learning Rooms”, VR environments
into which students can download their own images and sounds, were the
result of long discussions between teachers and software developers. The
software needed to be easy to use and not intimidating to students or
teachers. Trials in schools showed that while students had no fears about
using VR software or using headsets, teachers were ill at ease when faced
with such technology and thus making it CD-based in the first phase would
place the software in a domain with which most teachers were familiar.
In the development of the software the option for headset use is always
there, though there are considerable cost implications. Tracked headsets
of acceptable optical quality cost between £2,500 and £3,500.
Merseygrid lend their headset out to their schools and set up special
sessions for students to view their work in an immersive experience. The
evolution of educational VR within the project was kept in mind from the
beginning: the software allows linking to other VR projects made by other
schools and organizations. The ability for an interior room displaying
students’ work to be linked into an external environment, i.e. so
students can leave their room via a door to an external square and enter
other students’ environments, is important, allowing the concept
of a virtual village containing shops, museums, galleries and curriculum-specific
areas. Software had to be developed that minimized the need for downloads
and complicated additional software, so software was designed to run from
a minimum Pentium 2 specification with basic use via Windows accessories
applications for sound recording and paint. Students learn ICT skills
at the same time as learning and creating by the process of having to
transform images into specified formats, recording or importing their
own sounds, and presenting results to other students via a projector.
Current and future developments in educational and heritage virtual reality
Standalone and web-based
Merseygrid has worked with some 120 schools now using this new technology,
who have used it for the following projects: creating a profile of each
student’s successes that can be shown to teachers in their next school
when they transfer schools; fashion projects where the students create
galleries by decade, using pictures provided by their parents and scanned
in; recording field trips for history and foreign language exchanges.
Future developments on Merseyside take in the following variations on
the basic VR galleries. Another version of the virtual gallery has been
developed which allows the learner to click on part of a picture to hear
a sound, and also to open up a web browser. The implications for this
are that people with reading difficulties, such as young children or adults
with a phobia of using the internet can click on visualized icons or objects
that lead them into the appropriate web-site without having been put off
by the mass of urls and web addresses that appear in any search engine.
The Museum world has been taken by the potential of VR software and Ross
Parry, lecturer in new technologies in the Museum Studies Department of
Leicester University, is working closely with educationalists to ensure
that the museum and heritage worlds use the virtual to widen the public’s
access to real exhibits. In his paper “Overcoming the Shock of the
New-changing the agenda for digital learning”, Ross Parry writes,
“For what the innovative work of Education City (now Semantise) is
doing in its interactive, low-cost experiences for lifelong learners (what
elsewhere has been called its ‘Knowledge Space’) is quite literally
rethinking the space of the museum. The thought processes at the kernel
of the creative networked virtual reality products that John Hopwood’s
team are building, raise questions about the very essence of what museums
are and what they are trying to do.” Ross Parry’s current E-Box
project involves MA students from Leicester University creating interactive
web-based teaching and learning materials for literacy and history Key
Stages focused on objects from Leicester Museums, each site being linked
through images in a CD-based virtual environment.
Networkable
Another important focus is on the development of software that enables
students to store resources and to allow distant downloading of images
and sounds, so that collaboration can take place. Such collaboration was
first used in a project called the Electronic Village, funded by the DFEE
and the Central Bureau for Educational Exchanges, where students were
linked up using software called “FirstClass”, that allowed them
to send to a server images, mails, text and sound files that their counterparts
could download and place in CD-based virtual galleries. The” FirstClass”
software has been customized into “Open-School.net” for the
UK curriculum and is currently being used to enable a greater number of
schools in the UK and abroad to be easily linked ahead of virtual reality
collaboration. The ability to be a three- dimensional virtual reality
actor within a VR experience has been developed so that students can meet
each other via ISDN as virtual characters, interacting with each other
within a realistic environment while talking to each other as they would
using a telephone. A technology college, Range High School, near Southport,
has commissioned a networked virtual reality suite, which will act as
a development test bed for networked virtual reality and be a base for
links out into other projects, such as a VR room displaying the archives
of Liverpool Libraries, the Museum Studies E-box project, Ellesmere Port
Educational Action Zone’s Boat Museum VR experience, the Virtual
Chester web-site and many others.
Conclusion and call for collaboration
The development of gaming quality virtual environments for learning has
been brought about by partnerships and collaboration, involving software
specialists, educationalists and games industry practitioners. Merseygrid
and its partners look forward to sharing expertise with educationalists
and other interested parties in Ireland. Language learning environments
for the Irish language, cultural and heritage links between Liverpool
and Dublin, Liverpool and Cork, links between Wales and Ireland, can all
be enhanced for learners by virtual environments which can encourage people
to experience the real. Plans have been made for Arthouse, Temple Bar,
Dublin to be the venue for a networked immersive virtual reality conference
between Liverpool and Dublin in the Spring, the focus of which is provisionally
a virtual exhibition to celebrate the work of Edward Chambre Hardman,
photographer, born 1898 in FoxRock, County Dublin, died 1988 in Liverpool,
which may serve as an appetizer for the more formal twinning arrangements
later this year. Merseygrid have asked the author to extend an open invitation
to colleagues in Ireland to collaborate on projects of common interest,
whether in the schools, museums, lifelong learning sectors or any other
in which the virtual environment or ‘knowledge space’ can be
used to share experience and create real durable links through virtual
first meetings. The game has become serious!
Bibliography and references:
DfEE (1997). Connecting the Learning Society: The Government’s Consultation
Paper on the National Grid for Learning, U.K.: Department of Education
and Employment.
DfEE (1998). Open for Learning, Open for Business: The Government’s
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Mitchell, W. L. (1999). Moving the museum onto the Internet: The use
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and R.A. Earnshaw, Virtual Worlds on the Internet. IEEE Computer Society
Press, 263-278.
Parry, R (2001) Overcoming the Shock of the New, printed in The Biology
Curator, Digital Learning Edition
Rowley, T (1993) Virtual Reality Products, in collection Virtual Reality
Systems, Academic Press Ltd 1993
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