Augmented, Alternate and Virtual Realities in Education

A classroom simulator platform operating out of UCF is breaking new ground for how teachers hone their craft.

In higher education, we’ve been talking about “e-learning” for years. But, in practice, we have mostly been teaching in the same way just through different mediums; that is, delivering one-way lectures online, posting digital lecture notes and occasionally “innovating” with quizzes.Instead of students passively learning from a lecturer, imagine immersive online “serious” games where students can learn through practice.

Virtual patients now allow medical students at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) to develop diagnostic and clinical skills through online scenarios. They can learn from their mistakes with no adverse consequences for real life patients and without the need to be at the university.

CAVE2™, the next-generation large-scale virtual-reality environment, is a hybrid system that combines the benefits of both scalable-resolution display walls and virtual-reality systems to create a seamless 2D/3D environment that supports both information-rich analysis as well as virtual-reality simulation exploration at a resolution matching human visual acuity.

CAVE2 creates new opportunities for users to collaborate using both 2D and 3D. Today, all science is e-science: computers capture, filter, analyze and visualize data from instruments and simulations. CAVE2 serves as the lens of a virtual “telescope” or “microscope,” enabling users to simultaneously see and analyze one or more e-science datasets that reside in cyberspace.