Page 27 - Campus Technology, May/June 2019

iversity theater students to
munity of Spiroans, a prehistoric culture that inhabited the site between AD 900 and 1300.
“While much of the Spiro culture is still a mystery, the 3D immersive environment will give participants the chance to see what a ceremony may have been like, in a very immediate and interactive way,” said David Fredrick, director of the Tesseract Center, a game development and visualization studio housed at the university. “Creating this experience allows us to bring the past into the present in a very tangible and meaningful way.”
And the libraries at the University of Nevada, Reno are work- ing with that institution’s Anthropology department to create a “virtual museum,” which involves scanning and photographing the department’s collection of Native American baskets. “The idea here is to use VR technology to allow library users and members of the community to have access to an impressive and expansive collection of exquisite baskets,” said Multimedia Production Spe- cialist Michelle Rebaleati during a TEDxUniversityofNevada talk. “In the VR museum, visitors can pick up, inspect and look closely at the items contained in the collection. Because the actual bas- kets are delicate and can’t be handled, we are delivering the col- lection to users in a new, revolutionary way.”
5) Going on Space Walks
During a space walk, an astronaut’s job involves communication — strictly via voice — with mission control and others inside and out- side the spacecraft. Now NASA is tapping ideas from higher ed to develop innovative helmet-based displays that use Microsoft Holo- Lens to provide instructions through the augmented reality display environment. Numerous student teams from institutions through- out the land are participating in this latest NASA SUITS (“Spacesuit User Interface Technologies for Students”) challenge. A set of final- ist teams recently headed to Johnson Space Center to test their designs, including students from the University of Baltimore’s (MD) Digital Whimsy Lab, the University of Akron (OH), the University of Northern Texas, Florida’s University of Miami, the University of Colorado Boulder, Virginia Tech and Boise State University (ID).
The software from Boise, for example, would help ground con- trol send new procedures during an extravehicular activity and provide displays of images, 3D paths and instructions on how to safely navigate outside the International Space Station. In true student fashion, that team’s software, “ARSIS” (for “Augmented Reality Space Informatics System”), includes a voice recognition system named Adele (for mathematician and programmer Adele Goldstein, who wrote the documentation for ENIAC), which, when a warning goes off, breaks out into “Skyfall” by today’s Adele.
tion begins.
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