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QuickTime Virtual Reality in the Classroom: A first attempt and follow-up activities
A computer science and mathematics teacher at Seward High School walks us through the process that he and his students went through in using QuickTime Virtual Reality to provide us with a tour of their high school. By Russ Wissing |
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Virtual Reality does not provide the same experience as full immersion
virtual reality, but it does have some valuable uses in the classroom
setting. I teach computer science and mathematics at Seward High School
in Seward, Neb. In our upper-level classes we create Web pages and work
on advanced desktop publishing and presentation software. I also try
to incorporate a new technology as a final project in my classes. At Seward High we are on an intensive block schedule, which means we have 90 minute class periods that meet five days a week. This schedule is perfect for an upper- level technology class. The students have time to work on a project, ask questions, and then refine their work. My teaching assignment was three sections of Computer III and as our final project we decided to do a virtual tour of our high school to add to our school's Web site. |
Russ Wissing |
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class chose a section of the school to work on. We included the major
areas such as the main entryway, the lunchroom, several classrooms,
the gym, the football field, and the parking lot. To create a QTVR tour
you first begin by setting up a digital camera on a tripod and taking
a series of 16 pictures that form a 360 degree panorama of images. Next,
using a software package called QuickTime Virtual Reality Authoring
Studio you stitch the images together into a seamless panorama. After you have several panoramas created, you can use Authoring Studio to link these together into a scene. A hot spot is defined at some point in one panorama and you can define a spot in another panorama to link to. One or two- way links can be created so you can easily navigate back and forth in your scene. You can also create hot spots that can link to sites on the Internet, other scenes, or any other file. |
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was no small challenge to organize the creation of 10 to 15 different
panoramas by three different sections of students, but with our block
schedule it allowed time to take the pictures and stitch them together
all in one class period. For two days students were wondering why there
was almost always a group of computer students roaming the hallway with
a digital camera on a tripod. Luckily our administration is very supportive
of the use of technology so they didn't mind the students in the hallway
during class time. When we created the virtual tour we were using an older digital camera. To download the images to your computer you had to hook the camera to the communications port on your machine and wait and wait and wait. This was probably the most frustrating part of the project. As soon as the images were downloaded, another group of students were out the door tripod in hand and a few minutes later were waiting to transfer their 16 images to the computer. |
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We inserted the tour on the startup page of our high school's Web site and considered our first venture into QTVR a success.
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all the panoramas were completed each class stitched their section into
the big scene. Because our school is networked it was easy to transfer
files from the students folders to a central machine . I did spend a
couple of my planning periods taking pictures of hallways to make the
tour travel more smoothly, but after this the project did go together
smoothly. It took only about two ninety-minute class periods from start
to finish for each class. With a little extra time on my part, we had
created a tour of our high school. The final product is in the form
of a QuickTime movie. It can be inserted into a Web page just as other
movies are inserted on a page. A special plugin (QuickTime version 3.0
or above) is needed to play back the movie but it is available for free
on the Internet. We inserted the tour on the startup page of our high school 's Web site and considered our first venture into QTVR a success. Now that the first try was a success I wanted a more meaningful project for the next quarter when we would try the project again. The project did use many useful skills. The students learned to use the digital camera, transfer files from a peripheral device, edit images, manage files on a network, and also how to create a QTVR project. Even with all these positives I thought there could be some way to use this technology to enhance our existing curriculum in other areas beside technology and not just to make "neat" projects. |
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found my answer when talking to another member of our faculty who also
is a member of the Fourth of July committee. He wanted my class to create
a Web page for the community of Seward to publicize the celebration
that the community is famous for. He was happy when I went one step
further and said we would also create virtual tours of attractions around
town. This was the last quarter of the year and because of some snow days the seniors were out a full week and a half before the juniors. Because this is an upper-level class, all of my remaining sections were 10 students or less. I checked out a van for the day and we traveled around town snapping photos for the ninety-minute period. Because of our block schedule the students didn't have to miss a minute of any other classes. The next day we stitched the panoramas together and the third day we added them to the Web pages that we had created earlier to promote the Fourth of July celebration. |
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this round, we had purchased a Sony Mavica digital camera that saves
images to a disk. The purchase was made with grant money, as I am a
member of a federally funded challenge grant, The
Connections Project. This is how we got the camera in the middle
of the year. This new camera cut the creating time at least in half.
After you took one series of pictures you could just pop in another
disk and didn't have to wait for the download process. When the project was complete, we had completed a nice community service project that was of high quality and the students had learned much about Web page creation, which was our curricular area to be covered. I believe that there are many other uses for QTVR in the classroom and it is a relatively inexpensive technology that can be the next best thing to being there. |
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areas such as mathematics, history, English, art, etc. could use this
technology to enhance some of the projects that they currently are doing.
The ability to create a 360 degree view of an object or place is a good
alternative when you can't be there. I am also working on combining
QTVR with JavaScript to do online testing or reviewing and give students
immediate feedback and results. I think this technology has great potential
and there are a growing number of good resources on the Web that are
utilizing QTVR.I have included below some links to some of the projects my students and I have created and some links that may be helpful if you are interested in trying to create your own QTVR projects. Links: Presentation on how to create QTVR movies. QTVR panoramas of attractions around Seward. Combination of QTVR with
JavaScript to do online testing.
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