NCSA NEWS

NLANR Gives Educators a Peek at New Technologies

released April 24, 2001

A member of the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR) distributed applications support team (DAST) gave K-12 teachers, administrators, and technical specialists a "peek over the horizon" at the recent BellSouth ThinkQuest Fellows Symposium, hosted by the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

Mitch Kutzko brought the NLANR ImmersaDesk, a portable virtual reality system, to the symposium and gave demonstrations to about 30 participants. Kutzko presented demonstrations of VR applications and visualizations, including Spirited Ruins, Optiverse, and NICE. All of these programs encourage teamwork in the classroom as well as in the virtual world.

"The idea was to show them some of the things being done, some of the things that can be done, and to get them fired up to work with these programs in their classrooms," Kutzko said.

In the Spirited Ruins demonstration, Kutzko collaborated with Robert Putnam at Boston University. Putnam's avatar moved exactly as Putnam did in the real world. So, if Putnam scratched his head in Boston, the people in Georgia saw him scratch his head on the ImmersaDesk display.

Kutzko also demonstrated the NICE application. NICE is a virtual children's garden, which allows a child to be in charge of the sun, rain, and clouds. The children work together to maintain their virtual garden, commanding the sunshine, rainfall and temperature. According to Kutzko, the application encourages children to work together as a team in the real seeking to keep their garden growing in the virtual world.

One of the main goals of NLANR's presentation at the symposium was to help people understand networking and immersive programs.

NLANR is a NSF-supported collaboration to provide technical, engineering, and traffic analysis support for NSF's High Performance Connections sites and the nation's high-performance network infrastructure. NLANR members include: the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

For more information about NLANR, please visit http://www.nlanr.net/.

For information about past NLANR IDesk travel experiences, please visit http://dast.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Idesk/Ideskpast.html.

For information about the distributed applications support team, please visit http://dast.nlanr.net/.

 

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