Student Created Content within the CAVE Environment

Jacqueline Blake; Gayle J Mayes; Mark Utting

The CAVE2 environment is a cylindrical space surrounded by 320 degrees of 2D/3D panoramic virtual environment, combining 80 panels with 7:1 surround sound and an optical tracking system in a visualisation studio space. The idea behind the Visualisation Studio is to enable students to see and interact with complex data and it is one of only two in Australia. The CAVE2 was installed by Mechdyne Corporation, however with so few installations very few general-purpose tools exist with any visualisations or teaching tools being custom built in response to a need. Therefore, the cost and time imposition of constructing any teaching materials formed barriers to using the CAVE2 for teaching with most of the tools constructed being static set pieces such as inside a turbine engine or very expensive 3D environments built inside the Unity game engine. These barriers had limited the number of academics who were able to use the CAVE2 as a teaching environment as the time required and the level of expertise required exceeded the level of perceived usefulness. The SLICE project initially focused on building general purpose, easy to use tools based upon platforms already used by academics such as PowerPoint. University of the Sunshine Coast users of the CAVE space were restricted to Nursing and Engineering schools until 2017, when 100 Sport and Event Marketing students from the School of Business, attended tutorials and presented their case studies as part of their assessment for the MKG221 course in the CAVE. The MKG221 course content, exemplars and case studies provided excellent opportunities to use visually high impact images in the CAVE. Students gained new knowledge and skills in formatting power point presentations and basic graphic design, and displayed a photojournalism "story" of their event in week 13. The SLICE project developed a set of standard templates for displaying content, along with a protocol for their use. This was the first time that standard PowerPoint templates had been used to display content in the CAVE2 environment. These tools enabled students skilled in creating their own content from Web 2.0 applications, such as Instragram and FaceBook to use those skills in a large scale professional environment McLoughlin and Lee (2008) stated in an educational environment we could term this as Pedagogy 2.0. From the Visualisation management perspective, Mark Barry contributed his time and skill in ensuring that this course ran smoothly, commenting that students who realised the importance of planning a story board had better looking presentations. He also stated that they now routinely use these tools to display content within the visualisation studio. Research undertaken on the pilot project required participants to complete a single page reflective instrument with six Likert scale questions and two open questions at three times during their semester. Students felt that the CAVE provided high visual impact with 98% agreeing; 69% agreeing the experience increased their learning; 86% that it held their interest; and was a moderately comfortable, 88% agreeing the experience was enjoyable.

Student Created Content within the CAVE Environment

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