UA enters virtual reality

Rick Houser is an ordinary professor in the school of education. However, in another life, he can fly across the campus and teach class on floating islands hovering over the ground like giant Frisbees. This exciting world is known to millions as Second Life, the online experience in which a person can be whatever they want to be and can do whatever they want to do in a virtual world.

Houser has been working in collaboration with several schools on campus to create a virtual campus for students, which is projected to be fully functional by next fall.

This virtual campus features an “island,” or classroom, that allows students to interact with others and class material from the comfort of their own homes. The class, School, Culture and Society, is scheduled to be ready by the spring term.

Houser said the class is nothing new for academia, with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Harvard being two of several schools to utilize the Web site for virtually simulated classes.

“It’s not just universities in America that are catching on, but others in England, Asia and North Korea, as well,” Houser said.

The planning stages for this virtual campus first began last fall, Houser said, when he met with other teachers, discussing ways to utilize virtual reality for academic purposes.

Second Life soon became a focal point for Houser and plans for constructing the virtual campus soon began. Houser initially started the project by himself, logging in more than 100 hours of work online to create the foundation for the University in the Second Life world.

After obtaining the floor plans for Carmichael Hall, Houser began work on constructing the virtual hall and had begun designing the building before an architect, who had heard of his endeavor, offered his services into constructing the building accurately and to scale.

Three students from the Computer-Based Honors Program have been hard at work constructing and scripting the layout for the campus: junior Tyler House and two sophomores, Joseph Florence and Andrew Mitchell.

So far, Carmichael Hall and Bibb Graves Hall are the only completed facilities in the virtual campus.

Houser, who has taught online courses for six years, said students seem less inhibited when they are online and more willing to ask the professor for further explanation of a point or to talk with peers in the class.

Another issue is the convenience of going places without having to drive, whether to socialize with peers or visit places that students couldn’t otherwise.

“With today’s gas prices, it is much easier to get together in a social environment then otherwise,” Houser said.

The School, Culture and Society class is scheduled to be functional by next spring, Houser said. Another class dealing with misbehavior is also underway, and will contain 10 to 15 bots, or programmed characters, that will behave badly on a regular basis, with students being responsible for bringing order to the class. Houser said research into Second Life will provide thorough analysis for cyber-bullying, moral development and decision-making.

When asked if Second Life posed as a negative influence for social health, condoning isolationism from the real world, Houser said that that was not the case.

“There’s always that potential that people will become overly obsessed with it, but it is still interacting,” Houser said.

According to the Second Life Web site, 1,364,568 users have logged onto the Web site in the past two months, with over 16 million having identities in the Second Life world.

Houser also plans to use Second Life to feature guest lecturers in the classrooms. This way, it would not cost the University thousands of dollars to bring them to the campus to lecture. The only thing that they would have to do would be to sign onto their avatar, or virtual self, and give the lecture from a distant location. Houser said that this opportunity presented itself last year when a guest lecture was able to give a discussion from a hotel room through eLearning.

Houser hopes to have Amelia Gayle Gorgas Library put on Second Life, giving students a chance to view digital articles and other online resources. Currently, other colleges, which include the College of Arts and Sciences and the Capstone College of Nursing, have been meeting monthly with Houser in discussion on how to use the site for their own needs, with the whole system fully operational by next fall.