Physical to Virtual: A Model for Future Virtual Classroom Environments

Virtual reality is a technology that has seen unprecedented growth since the turn of the century with increasing applications within business, entertainment, and educational applications. As virtual reality technologies continue to develops and markets expand, the world may see an increased demand for virtual classrooms: virtual environments (VEs) that students may access through immersive virtual reality technologies to receive guided instruction, conduct simulations, or perform tasks typical in a classroom setting. While many studies document how virtual reality is beneficial to educational processes, there is little discussion on how virtual environments should be architecturally designed. Thus one may hypothesize that physical design strategies translated to virtual environments may have similar results. This thesis investigates virtual environments for education by creating several virtual classrooms embedded within a selective digital twin of the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus. The design of the virtual classrooms was influenced by current architectural trends in classroom design while capturing unique abilities present within a virtual context. A physical teaching module was also designed to create a platform for educators within the university to deliver instruction within the virtual campus

Interstice

When I was about three years old, I distinctly remember being too small to see what was on top of the table. A couple of years later, when I could see those objects, I thought the world around me had grown smaller. In a way, it did, as I experienced, lived, captured, remembered, and shared the space repeatedly. This sense of the world shrinking was exaggerated during the Covid-19 pandemic, allowing new behaviours and modes of interaction to emerge. Continually shaping our modern lives, virtual technologies redefine how we access and share information and stories or even explore new places. Thanks to the exponential increase in our computing powers, we live in hyper- connectivity, constantly in sync with our multiple screens, tabs, devices and profiles. Smartphones serve as two- way communication bringing the world in and letting the home out. As people increasingly rely on digital tools for work, communication, and leisure, the boundaries between physical and digital realms have become blurred. The overlap of our stories, information and spaces has subsequently led to challenges in managing the clutter and disorganization that can arise in physical and digital realms, affecting productivity, well-being, and overall user experience. In response, this thesis aims to create a hybrid space that carefully calibrates information and architecture to initiate interactivity within home settings. The thesis adopts a human-centred design approach, including user interviews and iterative prototyping, to understand how augmented reality (AR) augments reality. Research focuses on young adults, primarily students and working professionals who have access to smart devices where increasing demand for personalized experiences present an ideal environment for AR to grow and thrive. Overall, the research and prototypes are representative of AR as a tool for novelty in familiarity, offering new ways of enhancing interactions and immersive experiences within the home. I believe this synthesis of our physical and digital elements will lead to a de-cluttered and productive mode of engagement

A Prototype that Fuses Virtual Reality, Robots, and Social Networks to Create a New Cyber–Physical–Social Eco-Society System for Cultural Heritage

With the rapid development of technology and the increasing use of social networks, many opportunities for the design and deployment of interconnected systems arise that could enable a paradigm shift in the ways we interact with cultural heritage. The project described in this paper aims to create a new type of conceptually led environment, a kind of Cyber−Physical−Social Eco-Society (CPSeS) system that would seamlessly blend the real with virtual worlds interactively using Virtual Reality, Robots, and Social Networking technologies, engendered by humans’ interactions and intentions. The project seeks to develop new methods of engaging the current generation of museum visitors, who are influenced by their exposure to modern technology such as social media, smart phones, Internet of Things, smart devices, and visual games, by providing a unique experience of exploring and interacting with real and virtual worlds simultaneously. The research envisions a system that connects visitors to events and/or objects separated either in time or in space, or both, providing social meeting points between them. To demonstrate the attributes of the proposed system, a Virtual Museum scenario has been chosen. The following pages will describe the RoboSHU: Virtual Museum prototype, its capabilities and features, and present a generic development framework that will also be applicable to other contexts and sociospatial domains

Virtual worlds in Australian and New Zealand higher education: remembering the past, understanding the present and imagining the future

3D virtual reality, including the current generation of multi-user virtual worlds, has had a long history of use in education and training, and it experienced a surge of renewed interest with the advent of Second Life in 2003. What followed shortly after were several years marked by considerable hype around the use of virtual worlds for teaching, learning and research in higher education. For the moment, uptake of the technology seems to have plateaued, with academics either maintaining the status quo and continuing to use virtual worlds as they have previously done or choosing to opt out altogether. This paper presents a brief review of the use of virtual worlds in the Australian and New Zealand higher education sector in the past and reports on its use in the sector at the present time, based on input from members of the Australian and New Zealand Virtual Worlds Working Group. It then adopts a forward-looking perspective amid the current climate of uncertainty, musing on future directions and offering suggestions for potential new applications in light of recent technological developments and innovations in the area

Emerging spaces for language learning: AI bots, ambient intelligence, and the metaverse

Looking at human communication from the perspective of semiotics extends our view beyond verbal language to consider other sign systems and meaning-making resources. Those include gestures, body language, images, and sounds. From this perspective, the communicative process expands from individual mental processes of verbalizing to include features of the environment, the place and space in which the communication occurs. It may be—and it is increasingly the case today—that language is mediated through digital networks. Online communication has become multimodal in virtually all platforms. At the same time, mobile devices have become indispensable digital companions, extending our perceptive and cognitive abilities. Advances in artificial intelligence are enabling tools that have considerable potential for language learning, as well as creating more complexity in the relationship between humans and the material world. In this column, we will be looking at changing perspectives on the role of place and space in language learning, as mobile, embedded, virtual, and reality-augmenting technologies play an ever-increasing role in our lives. Understanding that dynamic is aided by theories and frameworks such as 4E cognition and sociomaterialism, which posit closer connections between human cognition/language and the world around us

Malevolent Creativity & the Metaverse: How the immersive properties of the metaverse may facilitate the spread of a mass shooter’s culture

The innovation of the Metaverse heralds a new milestone in the Information Age as investors move forward with the plan to bring the metaverse to fruition. The metaverse will offer a heightened experience in terms of interactivity, economics, and platform, while paving the way for greater immersion through virtual reality and augmented reality technologies. It is likely that as the metaverse develops, gaming will offer a unique social experience through its features such as virtual worlds. Based on this, it is important for policymakers to look at extremist subcultures that will operate in the metaverse through these virtual features. Due to the role played by fringe subcultures in facilitating the recent mass shooting event in Buffalo, this article aimed to examine the main features of the metaverse and how its immersive properties could influence the creation of future metaversal subcultures that could act as a gateway towards future mass shooting incidents. To that end, it applied the model of malevolent creativity to the extremist use of online spaces to gain insight on how such properties could aid online extremists towards mobilization. Results show that the concatenation of malevolent creativity, innovation, and subcultural extremism may bridge the gap between ideation of mass shootings and mobilization. Based on this, the implication of this research suggests that tech entrepreneurs for the metaverse should be mindful of the risks that disconnection from the real-world society can create for young, isolated users and aim to implement safeguards in integral areas of the metaverse seven-layer chain, such as spatial computing, discovery, and the creator economy