An Interactive Museum Exhibit to Teach Restoration Ecology

1
An Interactive Museum Exhibit to Teach
Restoration Ecology

• Andrew Correa (Information Computer Sciences),
  Professor Bill Tomlinson (Informatics)

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 projects 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.
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.
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.
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 2 R esearch
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nformation 6 T echnology
www.ics.uci.edu/acorrea www.research.calit2.n
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