An Interactive Museum Exhibit to Teach Restoration Ecology

1. An Interactive Museum Exhibit to Teach Restoration Ecology Introduction Current software-based museum exhibits on display are less reliable and less intuitive than mechanical-based exhibits. Worse, often times once an interactive exhibit has been experienced, users do not make the connection between the exhibit and the real-world model that it was based on. While the experience may be entertaining, to be considered an effective learning tool an exhibit must cause visitors' understanding to transfer to real-world scenarios. Evaluation We gave demonstrations of working versions of our system to two groups, Girls Inc. (pictured) and Brea-Olinda High School (BOHS) Global IT Academy (GITA). The students ranged in age from 8 - 13. Students were immediately able to recognize that there was a correlation between our exhibit and an actual ecosystem and gave us suggestions on how our exhibit could be made more fun, intuitive, and accurate. (above) Visitors from Girls Inc. interacted with this multi-user exhibit. Purpose My project’s goal is to create a software suite that facilitates rapid development of effective software – software that creates engagement and encourages users to make the connection between model and real-world scenario. With this suite, it will be possible to create interactive museum exhibits that are robust, interactive, engaging, and educational. Technology We use 3 tablet PCs and 3 desktop PCs to act as 3 “rafts” and 3 “islands” respectively. Users can bring an empty raft up to an island to initiate a transfer of an animal. Pushing the “vacuum button” will cause the animals from the island to be sucked onto the raft. When the button is released, animals will be free to escape from the raft to the island. However, transfers can only happen when the raft is near the island. When an animal is on a raft and there is no island within sight, the animal will be trapped on the raft until another island comes into sight. (above and right) Students get very focused on the task at hand. Graphics This project relies heavily on its visual appeal. For this reason, 3 animators were on staff. They created models in 3DStudio MAX, which were then rendered from 8 angles as they performed various movements (running, walking, and looking around, just to name a few). These pictures were then inserted into the Macromedia Flash IDE and were readily available to be displayed in the demonstrations. The prototyped version of this software (called “The Ecoraft Project”) was implemented in Java and OpenGL (JOGL). This proved to be a time consuming and often very confusing process. To make the development process quicker, it was decided to use Flash as a graphics engine instead of JOGL. This greatly simplified the graphical aspect of coding. Currently, this decision is being re-evaluated. Andrew Correa (Information & Computer Sciences), Professor Bill Tomlinson (Informatics) To establish line of sight from tablet to desktop, infrared is used. The tablets come equipped with infrared ports already installed. Separate infrared devices had to be purchased for the islands. Once line of sight is established and the software decides it should make a transfer, the local representation of the animal to transfer is removed from memory and a string message is sent over the wireless 802.11g network. This message contains infor-mation regarding the type of the animal and its hunger level. Once the message is received, a new copy of the animal can be built. Conclusions The process has not yet finished, but since preliminary evaluations have shown that this museum exhibit averages 20 minutes of continuous engagement, it can be considered a viable museum exhibit. Since the students were able to give suggestions on making the system better, they recognized the correlation between real-world and virtual model, achieving one of our stated goals. Given this promise, the evaluation suggests the research should be further explored. Acknowledgements Mentor: Bill Tomlinson Animators: Craig Yoho, Anju Sharma Sound & Music: Lorenzo Canales, Mili Dutta Programmers: Andrew Correa, Paul Mac Alpine, Bryant Hornick, Man Lok “Simon” Yau (above) Wolves roam about as mice cautiously move away. S ummer U ndergraduate 2R esearch 0F ellowship in 0I nformation6T echnology www.ics.uci.edu/~acorrea · www.research.calit2.net/students/surf-it2006 · www.calit2.net