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Colloquia Archive

Visible Past: Learning and Discovering in Real and Virtual Space and Time

April 22, 2008

Abstract

Visible Past proposes a cross platform, scalable environment (Exploratorium) for collaborative social, geographic, and historical education and research. The Exploratorium will be deployed in a variety of settings, from Web to fully immersive virtual reality environments. Educational activities can be formal (classroom teaching) or informal (conducted in a museum or self-directed online learning setting). The specific goals of the Exploratorium concept are two-fold: 1) to create a set of tools for collecting, organizing, or disseminating knowledge in a collaborative manner at various scales and in various formats; and, 2) to extend and refine a theoretical framework and methodological tools for prototyping and testing future research and learning applications and architectures that benefit from 3D and location aware applications. The heart of the Visible Past Exploratorium concept, the Exploratorium, is an information space built on top of a georeferenced wiki database that can be accessed through a variety of avenues: full immersion 3D environments, Web interfaces, or Geographic Exploration Systems (GES), such as Google Earth or NASA's World Wind.

Biography

Dr. Sorin A. Matei, the Project Director and an Associate Professor in the Communication Department at Purdue University, has been involved in research and development of user experiences and has developed a number of research methodologies for understanding spatial orientation and learning in location aware situations. His most recent and relevant project, Spaceaware, conducted in collaboration with the Envision Center, investigates in a user-centric manner the feasibility of information retrieval experiences in a fully immersive, 3D virtual reality environment that mimic location-aware scenarios. He teaches multimedia design classes and has designed and implemented Web applications that utilize 3D components (http://www.mentalmaps.info). His work was published in leading journals in communication such as Journal of Communication, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Communication Research, and Communication Monographs.