Last modified on Sat 8 May 2021 03.51 EDT
I’m playing online Pictionary while chatting with five people I’ve never met. This is not at all how I usually spend my Thursdays. We’ve all dropped into a virtual meeting space on a site called gather.town, which provides free customisable spaces for anyone who wants to organise a get-together without using Zoom. Gather is a virtual world and you choose an avatar before entering it: imagine a mid-80s Super Mario game in which, instead of jumping over his enemies, Mario has to go to the office. There are pixelated potted palms dotted about my screen, a couple of banks of desks and a sofa area, all rendered in that very specific 2D map style common to early computer games. I’m represented by a tiny, blocky avatar: a collection of dots arranged to look a bit like a person. As I move it around with keyboard keys, I can enter and leave conversations – when I do so, a small live video of whoever I’m talking to appears above the main s
Date Time
Next frontier in engineering learning – UK’s first university module taught wholly in VR
The University of Nottingham is running the first and only virtual reality and simulation module in the UK taught to engineering students entirely in VR.
Each week, 50 students visit a virtual teaching island, called Nottopia, for mini lectures and seminars to learn about using VR in product and technology design.
The teaching shift is partly a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, but primarily a way to offer students a more immersive and social learning experience. Students see it as an obvious way to learn about simulation and VR from within VR and much prefer the format to the conventional face-to-face lectures of years past.
Engineering students praise first ever university module taught completely in VR 15 Dec 2020
Professional Engineering
The entrance to Nottopia, the University of Nottingham s ‘virtual teaching island’ (Credit: University of Nottingham) Engineering students have climbed inside a giant jet engine and studied a driverless taxi thanks to a University of Nottingham module taught entirely in virtual reality (VR).
Aiming to offer a more social learning experience, overcome pandemic isolation and deepen understanding of VR and simulation, the ‘virtual teaching island’ known as Nottopia hosted 50 students each week for lectures and seminars on using VR in product and technology design.
The “Simulation, VR and Advanced Human-Machine Interface” course, which ran from September to December 2020, was open to final year undergraduates in mechanical and aerospace engineering, product design and manufacturing, and postgraduates in human factors and ergonom
Nottingham engineering students taught module wholly in VR theiet.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theiet.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
15th December 2020 12:47 pm 15th December 2020 12:47 pm
Engineering students at Nottingham University are being taught in an immersive VR module that could pave the way for lectures of the future.
Nottopia is a virtual teaching island that plays host to 50 students each week. As well as acting as a virtual lecture theatre, Nottopia is a platform for exploring the foundations and possibilities of virtual reality, allowing students to interact with lecturers and other users. While headsets can be used for a fully immersive experience, Nottopia can also be accessed via desktop PCs.
Topics covered in the Nottingham course include fidelity and validity of simulators, VR technologies, multi-modal VR, space perception, immersion and presence, natural language interfaces and VR sickness. According to course convenor, Professor Gary Burnett, the module has been an excellent way to use VR as an educational tool to foster student engagement and social interaction.