Developing a Virtual Campus is a JISC funded research project to investigating the infrastructure required to create and maintain a virtual campus. The universities of Nottingham and Lancaster are involved in the initial development of the virtual campus service, which is aimed at supporting distributed postgraduate learning. The service itself is based around cooperative virtual reality technologies, which present a campus environment to the user in 3D. The main multi-user VR system used in this project is CVE (aka Massive 2), developed at Nottingham University, which amongst other features, supports the spatial model of interaction^[1].

The focus of the project is on the postgraduate learning experience, utilising the social affordances of modern virtual reality platforms to encourage learning though meeting people and exchanging information with them, The social side of the learning experience, where students, teachers and experts can mix together, requires an architecture that is sympathetic to the requirements of this user group. One of the aims of the project is to augment existing VR platforms with the tools and services needed to realise a learning or educational environment. This realisation of such an environment comes from the creation and maintenance of a space in addition to its delivery and visualisation. Therefore the project also investigates the creation of 3D worlds that are rich enough for end users to find stimulating and of some practical use.

This web site contains some of the work that has beeing conducted for this project, which include visualisation and vectorisation software, service connection wizards and online demonstrations of 3D world editing. The site has been divided into four sections, which can be identified by the navigator in the top left-hand corner of this web page The main two sectios are the documentation associated with the project and the tools that have been created. Please feel free to explore the site; if you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please email Peter Phillips (p.phillips@lancaster.ac.uk)

References:

1: The spatial model of interaction.

Last modified: Saturday, January 22, 2000