A Guide for Creating Great VR Storyboards: Planning to Make Your Virtual Vision a Reality

Virtual reality technology has grown in popularity due to increased industry production and innovation. However, the creation of quality content to run on these systems has lagged behind in comparison to the design of the physical equipment required to access virtual environments. How does one go about designing quality VR content? Originally created as instructional material for students in Brenta Blevins’ DGST 301E class, this infographic walks readers through the brainstorming and storyboarding process of creating virtual reality projects. This guide is useful for a wide audience of content creators as they take inspiration from other content mediums, think spatially, and consider the accessibility of their final products

Building experiential live campaigns for social media

Despite the prominence of social media and the increasing interest towards experiential live marketing, no prior studies have evaluated how organizations can successfully create experiential live campaigns (ELCs) in social media. This study draws together the framework for building ELCs in offline environments and the framework for creating virtual experiences in online marketplaces. Annexing the two concepts enabled the author to develop a theoretical framework for investigating how virtual environments impact the design and implementation of, what can be called, virtual experiential live campaigns (vELCs). Study was conducted qualitatively by examining a case campaign ‘Checkout247’. Data for the analysis was gathered through interviews with creators of the campaign and netnographic analysis on 3000 consumer comments on organizators’ brand communities. Based on findings, author developed a modified framework for building vELCs to highlight the main differences between ELCs in offline and online environments. Results enabled the author to conclude that virtual experiential marketing can serve as an effective tool for designing and implementing ELCs in social media, and that social media indeed can serve as an impactful and cost-efficient channel for delivering virtual experiences

Co-creating and mapping curricula to the VLE

Changes in Higher Education (HE) teaching and learning frameworks, student cohort types, expectations and their evolved learning and engagement needs herald the demand for new approaches to designing curricula. The view that students know what they want, student centered learning, and HEs drive for mapping of curricula onto the Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) promotes the adoption of co-creating curricula. By mapping co-created curricula onto VLEs, the aspired goals are to encourage ownership, enhance students’ engagement and collaborative learning. There are many challenges expected in the Analysis, Design and Implementations Life Cycle perspectives

Exploring the Virtual Infrastructures as a Service concept with HIPerNET

With the expansion and convergence of communication and computing, dynamic provisioning of customized networking and processing infrastructures, as well as resource virtualization, are appealing concepts and technologies. Therefore, new models and tools are needed to allow users to create, trust and enjoy such on-demand virtual infrastructures within a wide area context. This research report presents the HIPerNET framework that we are designing and developing for creating, managing and controlling virtual infrastructures in the context of high-speed Internet. The key idea of this proposal is the combination of network- and system-virtualization associated with controlled resource reservation to provide fully isolated environments. HIPerNET's motivations and design principles are presented. We then examine specifically how this framework handles the virtual infrastructures, called Virtual Private eXecution Infrastructures (VPXI). To help specifying customized isolated infrastructures, HIPerNET relies on VXDL, a language for VPXI description and modeling which considers end-host resource as well as the virtual network topology interconnecting them, including virtual routers. We exemplify the VPXI specification, allocation and execution using a real large-scale distributed medical application. Experimental results obtained within the Grid'5000 testbed are presented and analyzed

Creating Online Content With Real World Application By Designing And Implementing Online Practicums For Virtual And Physical Environments

Universities need to assess student learning in order to determine if they are reaching the needs of the students, linking learning to course objectives, and determining if their courses have academic rigor. While many courses focus on the immediate course learning objectives, the use of final program projects and program assessments are becoming a key focus point for administrators, accreditors, instructors, and the business community. What do these final assessments tell them or not tell them? What are they searching for in order to satisfy their research and daily needs and questions? In particular, what key program assessments can be useful for these academics, as well as for the students who select to do certain elected assessments? The purpose of this paper is to focus on the use of online practicum, which serves an alternative to a master’s thesis or graduate comprehensive examination. While some students may elect to focus on their research skills or opt for the comprehensive examination, other online students tend to seek other means to have their skills assess and try another area of application. The third option for these graduate students is an online practicum, which is in a form of blended learning. The student chooses a particular industry to explore and work in, as well as creating a learning experience between him or her and a potential employer to apply their current content knowledge to a real world experience. This experience is in the form of a prescribed learning experience that is based on online learning, combined with the student’s current skills and content knowledge, and then applied to a real world environment for implementation of their newly created learning contract. This paper will examine the process from the creation of the learning contract to the implementation of the learning experience in this blended learning project. The key emphasis of this paper will be how the online instructor helps to facilitate the learning from a virtual platform, while the student moves into the next level of actual application of his or her skills in a physical working environment and will interact with the virtual instructor through a variety of learning medias as he or she works between these two types of environment towards achieving a set number of hours on the final learning experience, as well as preparing an academic-based, research paper to overview and evaluate the sum of the total learning gained from the practicum

Interactive form creation: exploring the creation and manipulation of free form through the use of interactive multiple input interface

Most current CAD systems support only the two most common input devices: a mouse and a keyboard that impose a limit to the degree of interaction that a user can have with the system. However, it is not uncommon for users to work together on the same computer during a collaborative task. Beside that, people tend to use both hands to manipulate 3D objects; one hand is used to orient the object while the other hand is used to perform some operation on the object. The same things could be applied to computer modelling in the conceptual phase of the design process. A designer can rotate and position an object with one hand, and manipulate the shape [deform it] with the other hand. Accordingly, the 3D object can be easily and intuitively changed through interactive manipulation of both hands.The research investigates the manipulation and creation of free form geometries through the use of interactive interfaces with multiple input devices. First the creation of the 3D model will be discussed; several different types of models will be illustrated. Furthermore, different tools that allow the user to control the 3D model interactively will be presented. Three experiments were conducted using different interactive interfaces; two bi-manual techniques were compared with the conventional one-handed approach. Finally it will be demonstrated that the use of new and multiple input devices can offer many opportunities for form creation. The problem is that few, if any, systems make it easy for the user or the programmer to use new input devices

When Windmills Turn Into Giants: The Conundrum of Virtual Places

While many papers may claim that virtual environments have much to gain from architectural and urban planning theory, few seem to specify in any verifiable or falsifiable way, how notions of place and interaction are best combined and developed for specific needs. The following is an attempt to summarize a theory of place for virtual environments and explain both the shortcomings and the advantages of this theory