VR tech brings geography lessons to life

You’re standing in an residence while you hear on the information that an earthquake has struck. Quickly you’re feeling your physique sway and the bottom begins to shake, the depth growing till the cabinets on the partitions and gadgets on the desk fall off.

For 10 seconds it stays that approach, loud rumbling filling your ears, and you are feeling an immense urge to crouch down and conceal. Then, as rapidly as they got here, the tremors regularly die out.

Upon taking off your headset, your turbulent environment dissipate and you end up again on protected and secure floor at NUS—fortunately.

By means of using digital actuality (VR) expertise and a vibrating platform, often known as a shake board, college students will quickly not solely study earthquakes by way of slideshows however get to expertise them too.

That is significantly eye-opening for college kids in Singapore the place earthquakes are non-existent, mentioned Affiliate Professor Feng Chen-Chieh from the Division of Geography.

Whereas the city-state sits outdoors of the Pacific Rim of Fireplace and is therefore spared pure hazards like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, NUS undergraduates can now expertise the tremors first-hand by way of the mission supported by the Studying Innovation Fund—Expertise (LIF-T).

The VR-based studying surroundings not solely plugs a spot in earthquake schooling, the place fieldwork is proscribed, but in addition simulates the earth processes that result in earthquakes, similar to plate tectonic actions.

“Fieldwork includes visiting particular websites, however the very best factor you would see is a crack within the land floor, a fault line, or a volcano. So, there’s some indication of an earthquake, however it’s static as a result of, after all, you do not need to be there when the bottom is shaking,” mentioned Prof Feng.

However getting thus far has not been simple, he shared, with COVID-19 delaying the mission by near a yr because of provide chain disruptions.

The group additionally needed to surmount one other impediment—creating digital eventualities that they, and in some circumstances, all humanity, haven’t witnessed personally.

Methods to shake: Re-creating unseen occasions

As a Taiwanese, Prof Feng has encountered a number of earthquakes, the newest being simply final December when he was on trip again residence, which had him grabbing onto the desk for 10 seconds throughout a Zoom assembly with colleagues.

Whereas he is aware of how earthquakes happen, he has not seen the various earth processes that both occurred tens of millions of years in the past or happen at areas inaccessible to people.

Take the formation of mid-ocean ridges for instance. They happen alongside divergent plate boundaries deep underwater, the place tectonic plates unfold aside, creating new ocean ground. Because the plates separate, molten rock from inside the earth rises to the seafloor, producing volcanic eruptions and in flip, earthquakes.

Representing a divergent plate boundary in deep water in VR is difficult, as “nobody has really seen this in actuality, so we needed to think about how they appear primarily based on printed supplies,” he mentioned, including that the group had many discussions on how the phenomenon could possibly be portrayed to facilitate studying earthquake ideas. Finally, they settled on mimicking the expertise of diving to the ocean ground.

There was additionally the difficulty of making certain the area information consultants—the NUS group—and the graphic designers understood one another. This required varied refinements alongside the best way to guarantee that the depictions have been correct but participating.

Expertise-enhanced studying: The way forward for schooling

The mission was Prof Feng’s first involving VR, however he discovered the ropes rapidly. By means of the LIF-T grant, he was linked to John Yap, a senior supervisor of NUS IT division who not solely helped him with the technicalities of VR, but in addition suggested him about potential pitfalls. These included the danger of scholars dropping focus, feeling uncomfortable, or experiencing vertigo if this system exceeds three minutes.

He was additionally linked to Prof Marcelo and Dr. Lee of Mechanical Engineering, who assisted on system integration, particularly the synchronization of VR, which offers perceptual suggestions, and the vibration board, which offers bodily suggestions. Now, with these hurdles crossed and the system constructed, the group will quickly be testing the system on college students to judge the effectiveness of the VR surroundings in bettering studying.

Whereas there aren’t any concrete plans to develop the mission but, the group has some preliminary concepts to create new eventualities. They embrace simulating cascading pure hazards similar to an earthquake adopted by a tsunami, or how pure hazards have an effect on the constructed surroundings.`

Though such VR environments is not going to utterly change slideshows, they’ll definitely make studying extra immersive.

“Our final purpose is to reinforce our college students’ experiences within the classroom, including a contact of realism to earth science ideas that may typically be arduous to visualise particularly after they occur over tens of millions of years. We compress that right into a matter of seconds,” he mentioned.