Abstract
A recent boom has been seen in 3D virtual worlds for entertainment, and this in turn has led to a surge of interest in their educational applications. Although booming development has been seen, most of them only strengthen the traditional teaching methods using a new platform without changing the nature of how to teach and learn. Modern computer science technology should be applied in STEM education for the purpose of rising learning efficiency and interests. In this paper, we focus on the reasoning, design, and implementation of a 3D virtual learning system that merges STEM experiments into virtual laboratory and brings entertainment to knowledge learning. An advanced hand gesture interface was introduced to enable flexible manipulation on virtual objects with two hands. The recognition ability of single hand grasping-moving-rotating activity (SH-GMR) allows single hand to move and rotate a virtual object at the same time. We implemented several virtual experiments in the VR environment to demonstrate to the public that the proposed system is a powerful tool for STEM education. The benefits of this system are evaluated followed by two virtual experiments in STEM field.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
References
Mohan, B.: Language and content, reading, p. 146. Addison-Wesley, MA (1986)
Gibbs, G., Simpson, C.: Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education 1(1), 3–31 (2004)
Mansureh, K., Atsusi, H.: Examining the Pedagogical Foundations of Modern Educational Computer Games. Computers & Education 51(4), 1729–1743 (2008)
Pantelidis, V.S.: Virtual Reality in the Classroom. Educational Technology 3(4), 23–27 (1993)
Psotka, J.: Immersive Training Systems: Virtual Reality and Education and Training. Instructional Science 23(5-6), 405–431 (1995)
Gibbs, G., Simpson, C.: Conditions Under Which Assessment Supports Students’ Learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education 1(1), 3–31 (2004)
Peter, W.: Airasian, Classroom Assessment. McGraw-Hill, Inc., (1991)
Hinckley, K., Pausch, R., Proffitt, D., Kassell, N.F.: Two-Handed Virtual Manipulation. In: ACM Trans. Computer-Human Interaction, pp. 260–302 (1998)
Ma, T., Wee, W., Han, C., Zhou, X.: A Method for Single Hand Fist Gesture Input to Enhance Human Computer Interaction. In: Intl. Conf. on HCI, vol. 5, pp. 291–300 (2013)
Ma, T., Wee, W., Han, C., Zhou, X.: A Study of Hand Fist Kinematics and Its Detection Method That Enhances Human-Machine Interaction. In: In Proceeding of International Conference on Multimedia and Human Computer Interaction (MHCI), Toronto, Canada (July 2013)
Heikkila, J., Silven, O.: A four-step camera calibration procedure with implicit image correction. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 1106–1112 (1997)
Fusiello, A., Trucco, E., Verri, A., Verri, R.: A Compact Algorithm for Rectification of Stereo Pairs. Journal Machine Vision and Applications 12(1), 16–22 (2000)
Charles, P.: Digital Video and HDTV, ch. 24, pp. 291–292. Morgan Kaufmann (2003)
Phung, S.L., Bouzerdoum, A., Chai, D.: Skin segmentation using color pixel classification: analysis and comparison. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 27(1), 148–154 (2005)
Bradski, G., Kaehler, A.: Learning OpenCV. O’Reilly Media (2008)
Kim, T.K., Wong, S.F., Cipolla, R.: Tensor Canonical Correlation Analysis for Action Classification. In: IEEE Conference of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 1–8 (2007)
Haralick, R., Shapiro, L.: Computer and Robot Vision, vol. 1, pp. 346–351. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company (1992)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ma, T., Xiao, X., Wee, W., Han, C.Y., Zhou, X. (2014). A 3D Virtual Learning System for STEM Education. In: Shumaker, R., Lackey, S. (eds) Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality. Applications of Virtual and Augmented Reality. VAMR 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8526. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07464-1_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07464-1_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-07463-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-07464-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)