Immersive Lab

Space/Equipment:

Size:

• 125m²

Potential Educational and Research Activities

This space is designed to facilitate the use of immersive technology that can create three dimensional digitization of seamless immersion into a virtual world and actively engage trainees in immersive, collaborative simulations.

Immersive technology uses multi-user virtual environments in which trainees interact with digital objects and tools that support collaborative work. Haptic devices provide force feedback so trainees learn the amount of force to apply when using the tools on the digital objects (e.g., a scalpel during surgery). Trainees share and navigate through computer generated 3D graphical space.

Immersive projection technology is increasingly used for distributed collaboration (collaborating across distances) with highly immersive and surrounding displays. Current specialized applications include, molecular visualization and architectural walk-throughs, however the increasing need for co-visualization of complex data and large-scale models will result in an increasing use of this type of technology for teaching and learning in specialized medical fields (e.g., surgical procedural training).

This space is currently under development. Some of the activities we envision for the immersive lab include:

• Simulating complex and repeated lab experiments (e.g., transgenics)
• Experience of physiology/anatomy
• Depiction of a 360° rural emergency scene
• Connect with computing science to provide content to meet tech applications
• Staging disaster
• Discussion and exploration of ethics and related issues
• Proteomics
• Virtual cell exploration
• Study reaction time in athletes (simulated game experience)
• Second life, virtual world meetings
• Research sandbox