Virtual Omaha connects students with geographic location information
>>Print ViewPublication Date: 06/03/2009
Zoe Hayes | Summer Reporter
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INDIANAPOLIS - The scene pans in on the beaches of Normandy; fortifications dot the landscape and landing craft bump against the shoreline.
But this is no scene from “Saving Private Ryan.” This is a 3D demonstration of Virtual Omaha, a Visible Past project seeking to connect students with information about geographic locations using a gWiki, or georeferenced wiki. Wikipedia is the most famous example of a wiki Web site, or series of interconnected user-edited Web pages.
This particular wiki seeks to link online information about a geographic location with that location in Google Earth or a similar georeferencing platform. It also interacts with an iPhone application that collects information on where users are and connects them automatically to pages about those locations – for example, a student at Omaha Beach could be connected to a page about a particular gun turret simply by standing where the turret was.
For video of the project, click here.
The project is the brainchild of Sorin Matei, an associate professor of communication at Purdue and affiliate of the Envision Center.
“Sorin came to me with this – just an idea, at the time, and it turns out it was a rather advanced idea, because as it turns out he had most of this planned out in his head on our first meeting together,” said Chris Miller, an assistant professor of library science and Geographic Information Systems specialist. Miller was one of the founding members of the project and worked on linking the pages to geographic locations.
“We weren’t sure exactly how you could mark up any piece of content to make it available spatially, but he absolutely had this whole workflow in mind wherein someone creates content and, being intentionally vague, that content is wrapped in a little marker saying ‘Hey, this is where this belongs on the earth,’ and then once you do this you sort of expose that content to all sorts of environments.”
At a demonstration Tuesday at IUPUI, Matei detailed several of the ways in which the interface can be used by students: It can be accessed in a traditional web-based browser, projected onto a screen in front of a classroom while wiki information is displayed on nearby laptops or web-capable cell phones, displayed in 3D at a designated facility, and accessed using an iPhone application that pinpoints a user’s location and automatically connects the phone to the wiki page for the nearest landmark.
The program is currently aimed at college professors and students, but Matei would like to see it utilized by high school teachers as well. “I think that right now, the environment is geared towards teaching college classes, but that’s just because my collaborators are college professors,” said Matei. “I cannot see any reason why it could not be used in high schools or middle schools.”
Miller sees the project revolutionizing the classroom setting. “We’re seeing (traditional classroom models) change in various ways and we’re seeing that kind of authoritarian, authoritative communication model break down these days, with wikis and all this participatory technology,” he said. “In a classroom environment, the kind of visual component is important, and the virtual reality component is fantastic, it’s spectacular, but it’s really the sort of instant communication and instant content that you can pick up from one site to the other and bring into a 3D environment that’s interesting to me.”
Matei’s vision is just as ambitious. “I’d like to see this project become the next PowerPoint. I’d like for professors of history, geography, life sciences, to use this as a replacement for PowerPoint,” he said. “And as a tool for assigning papers.”
Virtual Omaha is only one of a number of sites being developed, though it is the most detailed so far. However, Visible Past is also creating models of other UNESCO World Heritage sites, such as the Roman Forum and the Ankor Vat – Matei’s personal favorite.
According to Matei, about a dozen people helped create the project, including affiliates of Indiana University and several students at Purdue’s Envision Center. The Envision Center allows Purdue researchers to explore advanced computer graphics and visualization technology, as well as other ways for users to interact with computers.