Agile in Wonderland: Implementing a Virtual World Workshop Activity

For immersive 3D environments to be useful for specialist teaching, their programming facilities must be powerful enough to enable educators to create flexible learning tools. In this paper we describe the creation of a virtual environment designed to be used to host a workshop activity based on agile software development. Following an initial assessment of some available virtual world tools, the Java-based ‘Project Wonderland’ was used to create a proof of concept for running the workshop. We discuss the features that were implemented and a number of significant issues encountered during the process. In the light of our experiences, we assess the utility of Project Wonderland as a tool for creating an immersive workshop activity and describe the future work that would be needed to enable a robust and useable environment to be developed

Desktop haptic virtual assembly using physically-based part modeling

This research investigates the feasibility of using a desktop haptic virtual environment as a design tool for evaluating assembly operations. Bringing virtual reality characteristics to the desktop, such as stereo vision, further promotes the use of this technology into the every day engineering design process. In creating such a system, the affordability and availablity of hardware/software tools is taken into consideration. The resulting application combines several software packages including VR Juggler, ODE (Open Dynamics Engine)/OPAL (Open Physic Abstraction Layer), OpenHaptics, and OpenGL/GLM/GLUT libraries to explore the benefits and limitations of combining haptics with physically-based modeling. The equipment used to display stereo graphics includes a Stereographies Emitter, Crystal Eyes shutter glasses, and a high refresh rate CRT Monitor. One or two-handed force feedback is obtained from various PHANTOM haptic devices from SensAble Technologies. The application\u27s ability to handle complex part interactions is tested using two different computer systems which approximate the higher and lower end of a typical engineer\u27s workstation. Different test scenarios are analyzed and results presented with regards to collision detection and physical response accuracies