Student Blog: Project Parlors

This is my final entry for the student blog of the Spring ELI focus session.  As I mentioned earlier, I have dropped this laptop on its head a few too many times and it has some hardware issues with powering up and video display changes.  These led to the loss of my notes on the Project Parlor sessions on Tuesday.  Fortunately, I attended, and have reported in depth on two of the sessions I attended Wednesday that covered quite a bit more material.  And I had already reported on the Haptic Force-feedback session from Tuedsay.  So that leaves two sessions for me to cover here, albeit from memory.

First was the GeoWall, presented by Michael Kelly.  Michael is an independent designer who has demonstrated how GeoWall can be used to provide 3D simulations to the classroom.  I was blown away by the fidelity of this tecnology.  The resolution was near-HD quality and the depth was astonishing considering it was projected onto a 7foot diagonal screen that was more than 20 feet away from me.  From a hardware perspective, it seems to be consist of two LCD projectors hooked to a PC and 3D glasses for the students.  These are not the crappy red/blue 3D glasses, but the IMAX variety where each lens is polarized and the planes of polarization are at right angles to each other (so when you look through the glasses at someone else who is wearing the same style glasses, one lens appears black).  I assume that similar polarizing filters are either within or snapped onto the LCD projectors.

Open source software like iView3D is used on the PC to calibrate the cameras and display the images to the projectors.  There is a long list of partners at the web site for GeoWall http://geowall.geo.lsa.umich.edu/software.html. 

I guess the big issue is where does the content come from?  I am not sure where one obtains 3D models.  Michael is a geologist, so he showed a lot of 3D topography in his 15 minutes and showed how maneuvering through the 3D landscape conveys geologically-relevant detail much more efficiently than one would get through 2D media.  In my experience, a LOT of learners have trouble with exactly this skill - taking 2D + words and visualizing the 3D consequences.  GeoWall takes that obstacle to learning right out of the equation.  I think this is a very exciting technology.


Last, but not least, was the Remote Lab demonstration by Phillip Long of MIT.  This was also way cool.   The impetus is various physics and electronic labs that students need to access to do their projects must be locked up at night.  Yet many of these devices feature fully electronic inputs and outputs that could be manipulated remotely.  Throw in some clever web designers, cameras, and visualization software and the result is a set of labs that are now utilized much more efficiently and become more useful online than they are in person because of web-based logging and tool integration.  The neat thing about this is it improves the learning environment without requiring a huge cognitive investment in terms of course design.


Oh, well, this is the end of my blog for this conference.  I will be making one more comment on the Second Life entry I put up yesterday for my experience attending Sarah's in world class last night.

TTFN,
jt