Virtual Reality on a Desktop Hailed as New Tool in Distance Education

The gamelike technology spurs interaction, but can students really learn from it?

By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

Margaret Corbit hovers in midair above Cornell University's virtual science museum, and she beckons you to follow her into the clouds.

Stepping off a catwalk is a leap of faith, but Ms. Corbit reminds you that here, in a virtual-reality environment on the Internet, the laws of physics need not apply. "I don't have gravity turned on in my world," she says, flying off toward a new wing of the virtual museum.

Physically, of course, Ms. Corbit isn't airborne. She's sitting at a computer at the Cornell Theory Center, where she works as a science-outreach coordinator. But in a "virtual world" -- a three-dimensional realm that looks like a video game -- her virtual persona can soar, walk through walls, and gesture to others. That makes the online space a rich playground for learning, she says.

"It adds a dimension to social communication online," says Ms. Corbit, an architect of the virtual museum, known as SciCenter (http://www.tc.cornell.edu/Exhibits/Worlds). "When you are talking to a group, you actually can turn in the space and see them. You can ask them to wave if their network connection is working properly. There's something playful and more personal and uplifting about it."

Such graphics-rich online environments could bring a more human touch to distance education and make it easier for students to work together on virtual laboratories and other projects, say some researchers.

Others familiar with the technology, however, say that building 3-D environments for everyday distance education would be too costly and time-consuming, and that the technology should be reserved for teaching complex concepts that are difficult to illustrate with traditional teaching tools. And even some researchers who are experimenting with the technology worry that the graphics and animation could distract students from the substance of an online course.

Cornell's virtual science museum is just one of many education projects that use what is known as desktop virtual reality. The technology offers some of the benefits of high-end virtual reality without the bulky headsets or top-dollar computing power. Anyone with a relatively new P.C. and a 56-kilobit modem can visit these online worlds (although the faster the connection, the better their performance).

At the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, David Gill began teaching courses in a 3-D virtual classroom this summer. His first, a graduate-level distance-education course on young-adult literature, was held almost exclusively "in world," although an optional class session was conducted each week at a local coffeehouse for students who lived nearby. By the end of the course, only 3 of the 27 students in the class showed up for the in-person meetings. Mr. Gill, an assistant professor of education, says he was impressed by the level of discussion in the virtual world.

"We met in here three nights a week," Mr. Gill says as he guides his virtual character, or "avatar," through the virtual building he designed for the course's in-world meetings. The three-story building features an expansive atrium and balconies on the second and third floors. A virtual sculpture stands in the center of the atrium, but there is no podium. It doesn't look much like a classroom at all. A different logic is at work in the virtual space.

During class sessions, the students' avatars stood around the atrium, or just outside, but they weren't required to remain clustered in one spot. Discussion took place in a chat window below the software's graphical window, and students could read the chat no matter where their avatars were standing in the virtual world. Mr. Gill let students wander off and explore the building if they wanted to take a break.

"They tend to stay close," he says. "There seems to be a need to interact with other avatars." The software Mr. Gill used to create the world, a program called ActiveWorlds, allows avatars to take several preset actions at the push of a button, including jumping, waving, scowling, and dancing.

Students don't like it, however, if their classmates get too close, Mr. Gill adds. When two avatars collide, the characters appear to be superimposed on one another. In the course he taught this summer, "students became very offended if you got in their virtual space, and they would move away from you," he says. They also became disoriented when they saw classmates moving through the virtual walls, so Mr. Gill adjusted the settings to prohibit ghostly behavior.

Christina Koenig, a senior who is taking a course this fall with Mr. Gill in a virtual world, says the graphics help make her feel more at home. "I think it's a lot closer to a real classroom than just having the common [e-mail] forum," she says, while visiting the world between classes to familiarize herself with the interface. "It's nice to know where everyone is at."

One scholar who studies virtual reality holds a continuing lecture series in a virtual world, the CyberForum (http://www.mheim.com/cyberforum). "It's somewhere between a lecture symposium and a party," says Michael Heim, a professor of digital media at the Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, Calif.

Mr. Heim creates a different virtual space for each of the biweekly lectures, attempting to construct an environment that matches the topic. "It's a reverse memory palace," he says, referring to the practice of classical rhetoricians who organized their extemporaneous speeches by imagining the topics as rooms in a building. In the virtual lectures, he adds, "The speaker will be making points that will be supported and made memorable by the virtual environment."

"The visuals imprint the message on the brain," he adds.

Other professors are creating 3-D virtual spaces instead of World Wide Web sites as teaching tools for their courses. At the University of Colorado's College of Business, for instance, students can walk around inside a microcomputer and examine its components, thanks to a virtual world that models a typical P.C. The world was built for students in an introductory computer-literacy course. When a student clicks on an image of a microchip, a motherboard, or another part of the virtual computer, a Web page opens to provide more information about the component.

"We were trying to address the fact that people learn in a variety of ways," says David E. Monarchi, a professor of information systems at the college. He says he still remembers being entranced by a giant model of a human heart he saw at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry when he was a child. "For some people, walking around inside of a computer and being able to relate their knowledge of things to the kinesthetic experience is the right thing for them."

Mr. Monarchi says, however, that he isn't interested in holding classes inside a virtual world. He says it is too difficult to keep students' attention in environments that allow flying and virtual horseplay. He says educators need to figure out when it makes sense to use a virtual world, and when it's better to rely on more-conventional technologies.

Some educators are using virtual worlds to provide support services for distance-education students. A project called BorderLink, which works with rural high schools along California's border with Mexico to help prepare students for college, is putting the finishing touches on an environment called LinkWorld. Inside the world, nine meeting spaces will let students talk with a guidance counselor, a tutor, or one another.

Even the walls will speak in LinkWorld, says Carol A. Kerney, one of the project's coordinators. She explains that clicking on decorations like paintings and banners will take students to other Web resources that might help with their studies.

Ms. Kerney hopes that most high-school students will find it easy to navigate in the environment, because it works much like popular video games such as Doom and Quake. And the price was right, she adds. The world cost about $12,000 to design and build.

The University of California at Santa Cruz has replicated its entire campus in a virtual world to let prospective students tour the institution from a distance. A team of students and professional designers created the model of the 2,000-acre campus, complete with breathtaking views of wooded hillsides and a soundtrack that includes chirping birds. Visitors can even "teleport" instantly to any campus building (http://oasas.ucsc.edu/v-ucsc).

Although many colleges offer what they call "virtual" campus tours on their Web sites, most rely on panoramic images, short movie clips, or photographs linked from a map. Santa Cruz's virtual world goes a step further by letting students climb the stairways of virtual campus buildings and stroll through virtual academic quads. People in different physical locations can gather on the virtual campus to chat or stroll among the redwoods.

"This is a real, live environment that can support people and events," says Bonnie DeVarco, who coordinated the virtual campus's construction. Among the events are meetings between mentors and high-school students, says Ms. DeVarco, a special-projects consultant at the university's instructional-technology center for professors.

For true believers in the technology, 3-D worlds represent the next big Internet revolution. "It's similar to what we saw when we went from the text-based ASCII Internet to the Web," says J. Michael Blocher, an assistant professor of educational technology at Northern Arizona University. He is leading a pilot project to use virtual worlds in the college's online courses.

One of the most outspoken proponents of virtual worlds is Bruce Damer, a visiting scholar at the University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Laboratory. Mr. Damer founded and leads the Contact Consortium, a nonprofit group that promotes the development of virtual worlds. He has converted a barn beside his home near Santa Cruz into a studio for the creation of digital environments. He also runs a company that develops software for virtual worlds.

"I'm tired of the windows-and-icon metaphor, and I'm tired of the Web," he says, arguing that a naturalistic interface spurs more interaction among users than the Web does. If the Internet continues to use a document metaphor -- such as Web "pages" -- rather than a spatial one, he says, "in 10 years, you'll be sitting there and the only thing you can do online is chat or put your credit-card number in and push 'Submit,' and that's not cyberspace -- there isn't a space in there."

Education is a major focus of the Contact Consortium's work. Next week, it is sponsoring a conference that will bring together more than 100 researchers interested in using virtual worlds for education. Much of the conference will be held in cyberspace, though a few universities will serve as "nodes" where people can gather in person to discuss the happenings online (http://www.vlearn3d.org).

But some observers say that 3-D technologies still aren't ready for widespread adoption. "I would say that none of them are quite there yet," says Murray Turoff, a professor of computer and information science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, who has experimented with educational technology for more than 20 years. He says problems with the virtual worlds include low resolution and jerky images. Others complain that some of the virtual-world software, such as ActiveWorlds, is available only for P.C.'s and not for Macintosh computers.

Mr. Turoff says the major promise of the technology is to foster collaboration and teamwork, especially in the virtual science-laboratory components of online courses. "The lab area is the area that really isn't done very well today in most distance-learning programs," he says.

To others, the very idea of a 3-D virtual university is foolish. "For discussion of English lit, you don't need a 3-D program," says Philip L. Bereano, a professor of technical communication at the University of Washington. He says students don't have to see a cartoon character to understand that their peers are present in a text-based discussion forum. "There are very good reasons why we don't have the videophone -- people don't need it," he adds. "I know that I'm talking to you even if I can't see you."

Other critics point out that the notion of desktop virtual reality has been around for years but has been slow to catch on. A technical standard for desktop V.R., called Virtual Reality Markup Language, was released with great hype in 1995.

But Ms. Corbit of Cornell argues that virtual worlds will provide another option for educators and others online. "It's not going to replace anything," she says.

As for the virtual science museum, she hopes that it will encourage children in middle and high school to take a playful approach to learning about complicated scientific concepts. For example, the museum offers new types of hands-on exhibits, including the Gene House, where students can breed virtual rice, wheat, corn, and tomatoes with various genetic characteristics. Using a graphical control panel, students can select which traits to combine and watch the resulting growth.

"We take what appears to be a gamelike environment," she says, "and use it as an interface to more serious content."

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