Next Generation Virtual Worlds for Education

Next Generation Virtual Worlds for Education

Case Study of Duke School of Nursing and Unity3D

Case Study of Duke School of Nursing and Unity3D

The 100th monkey effect

Overview• Introduction• What is education?• What is 3D?• How does 3D help education?• Duke School of Nursing Case Study

– Use Case– Solution– Demo

• Future

Introduction• Kevin Tweedy

IT solution architect with 25+ years experience with companies like Anheuser-Bush, Digital, Amdocs, Influence, Koch International Supply and Trade, Merrill-Lynch and Rosetta Marketing

• Extreme Reality, Inc.Innovate and develop browser, mobile and desktop virtual reality simulations in Unity3D, Second Life and OpenSim.

What is education?–noun

the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.

What is 3D?• Text

Letters

• Pictures

Pixels (X,Y)

Color

• 3D

Geometry

Points (X,Y,Z)

Materials

If a picture is 1000 words, 3D is 10,000 words

Movies

Simulations

How does 3D help education?

• Bridging class room and real life

class room -> 3D simulation -> Real Life

• Creating situations not possible or costly to create in real life

• Augmenting 2D investment

Duke School of Nursing Case Study

Nurse Training Simulator Use Case

• Immersive environment• Ultra realistic, facial, fingers, inside mouth• Many students run same scenario• Single user and multi-user• Run behind the fire wall• Leverage existing investment in web servers• Avatars customizable• Robots and natural language processing• Animate any object• Use existing medical models and content

Nurse Training Simulator Solution

• Game development platform Unity3d• Content creation in Maya• Animations in Maya• Textures in Photoshop• Purchased avatars from TurboSquid.com• State synchronization with game server• Persistence with SmartAvatar • Deploy behind the firewall to existing web

servers

Duke Nurse Training Simulator Demo

• Unity3D Client• Purchase avatar models• Content in Maya• Animations in Maya• Integrating Content in Unity3d• Deploying to the web• Running in a web browser• Example of game server

Duke Nurse Training Simulator Demo

Future• Distributed virtual worlds

– scenes like web pages

• Virtual worlds as sharable files

• Youtube.com -> Yousimulation.com

• Horizontal market is passing fast, need to work on specific vertical solutions

• Object cameras

• Smart Avatars