Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Three-dimensional (3D) environments - also known as Virtual Reality (VR)
environments.
However, nowadays it is hard to imagine a multi-user VE without a graphical
representation.
VR environments offer to their users different immersion degrees covering a wide range of
possibilities that goes from the less immersive systems using only traditional desktop
devices such as keyboard, mouse and monitor, to the highly immersive that use VR specific
devices such as head-mounted displays (HMD), data gloves, or the CAVE TM .
The intend in using a CVE for instruction is to promote particular forms of interaction
among the students inside the environment, by means of creating, encouraging, or enriching
situations that would trigger learning mechanisms in the way Dillenbourg (1999) proposed.
CVEs provide the learner with a diversified set of computational features as well as a
powerful context for learning in which time, scale and physics can be controlled; where
participants can get new capabilities such as the ability to fly, or to observe the environment
from different perspectives as an object or with any other virtual embodiment.
CVEs offer a space that brings remote people and remote objects together into a spatial and
social proximity creating a natural interaction, which allows better communication
awareness (Wolff et al., 2005) and where users are likely to be engaged in interaction with
the virtual world and with other inhabitants through verbal and nonverbal channels. These
characteristics make them a proper scenario for knowledge construction, concurrent with
the socio-constructivist theory, as well as a proper tool for training in socio-technical tasks
(e.g. in coordinated situation such as rescue operations or enterprise logistic).
For the multiuser condition, 3D CVEs represent a communication technology on their own
right due to its highly visual and interactive interface character. They offer a learning
context that may allow the trainees to practice skills and abilities, and to get knowledge in a
situation that approximates the conditions under which they will be used in real life, but
using a safe and flexible environment where materials do not break or wear out.
CVEs can be used to train one or more students in the execution of a certain task, mostly in
situations in which training in the real environments is either impossible or undesirable
because it is costly or dangerous.
1.2 Intelligent CVEs
In the Computer Aided Intelligent Instruction paradigm, there is a growing interest on the
research aim of knowledge such as Intelligent Virtual Environments (IVE). VEs may
incorporate in different degrees, characteristics of learning environments through an
Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). Where the intelligence skills generally fall into a
Pedagogical Virtual Agent (PVA) to engage and motivate students along their learning
process.
The traditional architecture for the ITS consists of four modules: the expert or domain
module, containing the information to be taught; the student module, which maintains
individualized information of the students; the tutoring module, which provides a model of
the teaching process; and, the interactions with the learner controlled by the communication
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