VIrtual Reality Development Lab Create - VR in Education and Entertaiinment

Immersion

The Create Phase

Creating a virtual experience (or tour) is the stage in the process of creating immersive environments and experiences with the VRDL. The process is made quite simple with easy to follow instructions of the manual (supplemented by the Video Training Series) and supportive VRDL software.

Import Media

Once the field work is finished, it's time to move into the world of virtual reality by downloading pictures onto the computer via a smart card reader. Organization is important with the VRDL since the amount of media captured can be quite large.

The Student Projects folder is the saving grace with an organizational template built to house nearly every type of media they would capture for their project. Each media type can be intuitively placed and categorized with similar media.

Stitch the Images

Throughout this process, there will be a variety of techniques and software programs at your disposal that will enable you to edit your images in order to make each node in your movie as realistic and seamless as possible. Each of the fisheye images represents one half, or one hemisphere, of an environment. To create the full 360-degree environment, you will stitch the two hemispheres together to form a single image of the entire environment, called an equirectangular image.

Image Enhancement

Since Photoshop happens to be one of the primary professional tools for ceating and editing images in a multitude of industries, we have opted to include a copy of Photoshop Elements with the VRDL. The students may spend a good portion of tour development on photo-manipulation work.

Over the years of experiencial development, DTF has learned that one of the most important elements to creating intuitive and enjoyable experiences, are sensory cues familiar to the user. When immersed in an unfamiliar environment creators need to assist the user in moving about through virtual environments by familiar sensory cues (or navigational aids) in the form of embedded graphics, arrows, signs,, text or even aduio cues.

Create the Virtual Environment

The next step involves converting your equirectangular image into a much more realistic three-dimensional image. This is accomplished by projecting the flat equirectangular image onto a three-dimensional cubic surface. Think of this cubic image as an actual room. The top of the cube is the ceiling, the bottom the floor, and the sides are the walls. But here's the best part: when your audience views the 3-D image, the vantage point will be that of the camera at the time the pictures were taken - right in the center of the environment! Therefore, when you open your 3-D image on the computer, the image you see will be that of the cube walls in your field of vision. As you drag your mouse left and right or up and down, your view will change just as if you had turned your head in that direction.

Connect Environments

Once you have created your first 3-D image, you'll need to do the same thing for the rest of the stops on your tour. Each stop on your tour is called a node; you can connect one node to the next (or even to other media sources such as PowerPoint presentations, Web pages, external applications, movies, audio files, still photos, etc.) by way of hotspots or links. Hotspots are areas within your nodes that your audience can click on with their mouse. By clicking on a hotspot, the audience can move to the next stop, or node, on the tour, or find out more detailed information about a particular aspect of the environment. You can link and incorporate almost ANY TYPE OF MEDIA or application files including sounds, voiceovers, text boxes, movies, arrows or boxes to highlight specific aspects of your tour.

Using the example of the virtual hike, a group might add the sound of a nearby stream or waterfall, a gush of water that actually gets louder as you move towards it and fainter as you move away! Or, as an individual meanders along the virtual hike, he or she could click his or her mouse on the image of a tree or a rock formation in order to learn about an aspect of the area's ecosystem or geologic history, either by reading a bit of text or listening to a brief narrative.

In short, there is no limit to where the VR Development Lab can take you as a class. As it introduces students to cutting-edge tools in the field of technology, it also challenges them to use these tools to learn more about the world around them.