Technology and Tools for the Creation of Reusable 3D Content in e-Learning Systems

"Use of 3D content can be a very effective tool for developing cognitive readiness, providing information visualization and interactive physical simulation capabilities across a broad range of subject areas. Unfortunately, there is still a lack of designexperience and dedicated authoring tools allowing course instructors to seamlessly integrate and reuse this type of 3D content in today's education and training applications. soVoz's approach to developing 3D components not only can provide thesecapabilities, but simplifies the 3D development process as well, thereby allowing domain experts to directly author 3D content without the assistance of professional artists, animators and programmers. Phase I of the project determined the feasibility ofdeveloping a 3D component framework, runtime and authoring tool enabling the creation of reusable 3D content for Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) environments that is conformant with the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM). Detaileddesigns were formulated and a 3D component testbed developed for the creation and testing of 3D components. The testbed not only determined the feasibility of the soVoz approach, but was also used to refine the system design and demonstrate that complex3D content could be created in a manner of minutes. In Phase II of the project, production versions of the 3D component framework and runtime prototyped in Phase I will be implemented and a full-feat