Dynamic Virtual Environment for Multiple Physics Experiments in Higher Education

Abstract

The transportation of a campus classroom and/orlaboratory into a three dimensional virtual representation has changed remote learning, specially in engineering education. Our first collaborative virtual environment, a proof of concept, provides full functionality of one physics experiment, thoughthere are still some performance issues to be resolved. The next step for integrating TEALsim and iLabs in Sun's Project Wonderland is porting our system from Wonderland's version 0.4 to 0.5. Our goal is a system redesign in order to support adding flexibility to multiple physics simulations. The performance improvements in Wonderland 0.5 will allow a large number of avatars in our future scenario, where they will be able to run even more physics experiments, through a new 3D userinterface.