Alternative Access Project: Mobile Scoping Study Final Report
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3.3 Virtual realityWhile the application of mobile to augmented reality was clear to us from the start it was not until we started talking to people working in the field of mLearning that we realized the importance of virtual reality for mobile. Our initial thought was “Why would you want a virtual world (metaverse) to be modelled on the real world? What does mobile add to the virtual world?” Use cases that people have suggested include enabling remote access to field trips for remote learners and disabled students; orchestrating field trip “pre-visits”, so that students can get more out of planned field exercise by first familiarizing themselves with the terrain in a virtual environment; to help students transition to a new school by becoming more familiar with a new school environment and helping students to make good career decisions by playing out different career options in a virtual environment. To a certain extent some of the use cases described might be achieved with a 3d model rendered on a desktop computer, so it is not immediately clear how either mobile devices or a multi player game engines such as Second Life enhance the user experience. The advantage of a multi player virtual reality platform in this context is that the virtual user can enter the same space occupied by real world “players”, so for example a person taking part remotely in a field trip can see where other participants are and interact with them. The role of mobile devices is to provide the link between the real world and the metaverse. While the participant in the real world may have a richer experience of the environment in some ways ( for example being able to pick up and feel a rock ) the virtual participant may have access to supplementary digital information ( e.g. description of rock types ). The real world participant can use a camera phone to show the virtual player real world features (augmented virtuality) while the virtual participant can show the digitally augmented view to those on the ground (augmented reality). So working together the participants can share a space in different modes of reality, with each perspective enriching the other. Wright at al [50] have coined the term “virtual duality” to describe the new form of interaction afforded by overlaps between the real world and a social metaverse. Wright et al. demonstrate how a novel application of the camera phone where image processing techniques can be employed to create “portals” between the real world and a metaverse, where image matching is used to trigger the metaverse to change. [43, 50]. The potential power of this new mode of interaction for learning has excited many people working in mobile learning. In the editorial to the “Big Issues in Mobile Learning” report Mike Sharples argues that we have an opportunity to “…create extended learning communities, to link people in real and virtual worlds, to provide expertise on demand, and to support a lifetime of learning. “ [51] Musolesi et al. describes a novel technique for detecting a user activity (sitting, running, conversation) from sensors in a mobile device and mapping these to avatar activities in Second Life such as flying (triggered by real world running), hovering yoga (real world sitting) [52] . The authors suggest this could be used in social networking sites such as Facebook to provide a visual status of current activity. The authors did not make use of geographic data but it is clear that actions could also be mapped based on a user’s location (e.g. sitting in café maps to drinking a coffee) As part of the Digimap 3d project, EDINA has already created models from Digimap Mastermap and Digital Terrain datasets and imported these into an OpenSim virtual world engine [53] hosted on our severs. We identified both processing data and infrastructure requirements as areas where EDINA expertise may come into play. As part of the user engagement exercise we have now established several contacts with educators who have expressed an interest in using such a hosted virtual world to support teaching and learning activity. We recommend that JISC encourage such collaboration with a view to exploring the potential for EDINA to host virtual worlds as cloud based service. 
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