Collaborative Environmental Learning with the DigitalEE II System Augmenting Real and Virtual Experiences
Masaya Okada, Akimichi Yamada, Mizuki Yoshida, Hiroyuki Tarumi, Takanobu Kayugawa, Kazuyuki Moriya · 2004
† The DigitalEE II (Digitally Enhanced Experience) system realizes an important unsolved issue in research on learning, which is environmental learning based on real- time mixture of real and virtual experiences. The system enables real participants in nature and virtual participants at remote locations to share learning activities in real time via voice and visual information. Avatars in mobile cyberspace II, an online space for collaboration, express existence of the distributed participants. Both participants share their positional information via the space, and make interaction while sharing the same time and space between real and virtual worlds. Verification experiments on DigitalEE II showed that information gaps between the two worlds drew out both participants' motivation for com- plementing the gaps, and encouraged their interaction. The experiments raised participants' interests and awareness, etc. These results showed learning effects of DigitalEE II as well as new possibilities of the collaboration mediated by virtual-world expressions.