"The Virtual Spaceport:" Guided Distance Learning in Adaptive Virtual Environments W. Lewis Johnson Research Associate Professor Information Sciences Institute University of Southern California 4676 Admiralty Way Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695 email: johnson@isi.edu WWW: http://www.isi.edu/isd/johnson.html tel: (310) 822-1511 fax: (310) 823-6714 --------------- "The Virtual Spaceport:" Guided Distance Learning in Adaptive Virtual Environments W. Lewis Johnson The increased bandwidth and reduced latency that will be available in the Next Generation Internet offers significant potential in the area of distance learning. However, this potential will be realized only if the educational community is exposed to demonstration applications that make effective use of the new technology. In order for educators to clearly understand the limitations that current technologies impose on distance learning, they need to see instances of systems that transcend these limitations. We need to develop and demonstrate more effective ways of using networked computer systems to support collaborative learning. Currently popular learning environment architectures, such as teleconferencing systems, chat rooms, and MOOs, all have fundamental deficiencies. Limited interaction channels supported by such systems tend to reduce interaction to strict turn taking between participants. All communications are broadcast to all participants in the environment, making it difficult to support group learning activities where students work in small groups within a larger classroom setting. Meeting spaces are accessible to all student and teacher participants, limiting the number of students that can participate and increasing the risk that some student actions may interfere with each other. Most such systems are managed by central servers, severely limiting the amount of interaction that can be supported at any one time. This white paper proposes the design and demonstration of a new type of virtual learning environment that avoids the problems listed above. This environment is called the Virtual Spaceport, so called because it permits groups of learners to create (i.e. "launch") collaborative work spaces, and communicate and transport between virtual spaces. The system could serve as a showcase for Next Generation Internet technology: it will demand the kind of performance that NGI will offer, and could serve as a driver for technology development. Development of such a system will require close collaboration between educational technologists and developers of networking infrastructure. The Virtual Spaceport takes advantage of emerging low-cost immersive presence technology affordable for educational use, but beyond what is generally used. Each student and instructor workstation will be equipped with 3D graphics acceleration hardware, a video camera and audio microphone, and one or more low-cost tracking/pointing devices (preferably, 6DOF, but not less than 3DOF). The interface permits each participant to perceive a virtual space via 3D graphics and sound, and manipulate objects in the space using pointing devices, desktop menus, and/or speech commands. A virtual space typically includes manipulable objects, e.g. simulated objects and data visualizations, as well as avatars representing human participants. Each avatar has a realization as a simplified human figure model, coupled with a video display of the participant s head and audio for the participant s voice. Autonomous virtual humans playing the role of guides, advisors, and simulated participants may also be present in the virtual environment. Much of the technology required already exists, but is not practical on the current Internet. The Virtual Spaceport will support natural interaction with learning materials and with the participants (both real and virtual) in the environment. Each participant has a location and view orientation, and a region of interest. Audio and visual input will be sensitive to view and region of interest; for example, peripheral audio signals will be automatically attenuated unless the participant or agent producing the sound requests that the sound be to all participants in the area. In order to avoid interference between the activities of different students, it will be possible for groups of participants to create personalized copies of spaces, and where appropriate to transport from one personalized space to another. Teachers will be provided with enhanced displays that permit them to track students and communicate with them as needed. Some autonomous agents will be available to assist the teachers, by monitoring the students and reporting to the teachers when important events occur. Learning environments such as the Virtual Spaceport offer a number of challenges for on the Next Generation Internet research: - Bandwidth requirements. Multiple channels required, some of which like video require significant throughput. - Low latency. In order for there to be a sense of shared presence, data has to be transmitted quickly. - Variable and selective networking services. The communication bandwidth required to an individual workstation will vary dynamically. For example, the video and audio inputs to a give participant workstation will depend on the participant s orientation and focus of interest. We need mechanisms that permit the application to modify and prioritize its demands for networking services as needed, otherwise even high-performance networks will become saturated. - Distribution and migration. In order to dynamically create virtual spaces and populate them with interactive agents, we need to be able to create new networked processes on the fly, and permit them to migrate to where computational resources are available. Qualifications Dr. Johnson is Research Associate Professor, Computer Science and Project Leader, Information Sciences Institute, at the University of Southern California. He heads the Educational Technology Group at the USC / Information Sciences Institute, which is developing technologies to support training, education, and life-long learning. He is principal investigator of the following major projects, as well as related subprojects: 7 the Virtual Environments for Training project, which is developing intelligent agent technology to support training in immersive virtual reality environments, 7 the Intelligent Probes project, which is developing agent-based visualization and analysis tools to help instructors monitor training simulations, 7 the Media-Doc project, which is developing technology to produce multimedia explanations of software, and 7 the Automated Distance Education project, which is developing technology for automated delivery of individualized courseware over the World Wide Web. He is involved in collaborations with networking and virtual environment researchers both at USC / ISI and at other institutions. Dr. Johnson received his A.B. degree in Linguistics in 1978 from Princeton University, and his M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Yale University in 1980 and 1985, respectively. He is Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (SIGART), a member of the Executive Committee of the AI-ED Society and a member of the Steering Committee of the Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Conference. He is also chair of the First International Conference on Autonomous Agents, and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Automated Software Engineering. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ W. Lewis Johnson WWW: http://www.isi.edu/isd/johnson.html Project Leader, Educational Technology Group Tel: (310) 822-1511 Research Assoc. Professor in Computer Science Fax: (310) 823-6714 USC/Information Sciences Institute johnson@isi.edu 4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 1001 Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695