TILE: The Tactus Immersive Learning Environment.

Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) has seen explosive growth over the last decade. Immersive VR attempts to give users the sensation of being fully immersed in a synthetic environment by providing them with room sized screens and 3D stereo goggles, and allowing them to interact with life-size worlds. The technology is extremely effective for learning and exploration, and has been widely adopted by the military, industry and academia. Currently, the technology is cost prohibitive for K-12 education. We propose to develop a low cost immersive VR learning environment that uses commodity hardware such as graphics cards, projectors, and screens to dramatically lower hardware costs. To lower software costs, we will develop two tools- a software developer’s kit (SDK), and an authoring tool. The SDK would empower programmers with little or no VR experience to develop immersive applications quickly and easily. The authoring tool would allow non-programmers to design immersive simulations using a standard Windows application interface. This would allow educators and other non-computer programmers to take advantage of this rich learning environment without requiring substantial training. Finally, we propose to vet our Phase I results with 2 partner schools to solicit feedback regarding the potential for this technology in K-12 education.