Delivering virtual reality: a proposal for facilitating pedagogical use of three- dimensional computer models of historic urban environments

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Delivering virtual reality:
a proposal for facilitating
pedagogical use of three-
dimensional computer
models of historic urban
environments
Lisa M. Snyder
lms@ucla.edu
UCLA’s Academic Technology Services/
Institute for Digital Research and Education
and the Urban Simulation Team at UCLA
University of California, Los Angeles
Scott Friedman
friedman@ucla.edu
UCLA’s Academic Technology Services/
Institute for Digital Research and Education
and the Urban Simulation Team at UCLA
University of California, Los Angeles
Examination of the built environment is a
fundamental line of humanistic inquiry that
shapes our understanding of diverse cultures. It
is impossible to consider the ancient Egyptians
without immediately thinking of the pyramids
or the vast religious complexes of the Nile
river valley. The medieval pilgrimages and
the modern disciplines that study them –
history, literature, religion, musicology, and
art – are inextricably tied to the monumental
Romanesque cathedrals that blanket Europe.
This link between humanities scholarship and
the built environment is unquestionable, with an
inexhaustible number of examples that illustrate
how architecture and urban design reveal the
aspirations and priorities of cultures across the
ages.
The humanistic promise of virtual reality
environments created to academically rigorous
standards is that they would allow scholars
the opportunity to explore reconstructed
buildings and urban spaces, recreate the
experience of citizens from other eras, gain
insights into the material culture of past
civilizations, and engage formal and informal
learners in ways never before possible. Within
these virtual spaces, students could navigate
through reconstructions of historic urban
environments and engage with one another to
build knowledge through constructivist learning
exercises. Beyond pedagogy, this new form of
academic expression would engender new forms
of scholarship and publication.
Seemingly, the promise of the technology
is within reach. Scores of researchers
across the globe are hard at work on
a significant – and growing – body
of academically generated three-dimensional
content. Architects and archaeologists
have embraced three-dimensional computer
modeling to visualize un-built structures,
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reconstruct cities of the past,
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and explore
research questions specific to a single site or
structure.
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Yet, even given all that promise
and hype, two-dimensional drawings and static
images still dominate the research, study, and
teaching methods of architectural and urban
form. The problem is that only a very small
selection of digital work has been made available
to scholars, students, and the general public.
In part, this is because of a dearth of options
for easily sharing three-dimensional content.
Available on-line social-networking virtual
worlds such as Second Life and Stanford’s
Sirikata, while brilliant for avatar interactions
and communication, are not suited to the
study of highly detailed environments. The
platforms for most online virtual worlds do not
support the ability to import or export content,
thereby limiting the scope and functionality
of the exploration to a single platform. The
strength of available online mapping programs
like Google Earth and Microsoft Research Maps
is in their ability to let users interact with rich
geographical content on a global scale, not their
replication of the physical world and first person
navigation. While Google actively encourages
users to create three-dimensional content with
its free modeling package (Sketch Up), there are
extreme limitations to using Google Earth for
the study of the built environment. Navigation
is geared towards bird’s-eye examination of
schematic forms, and the models that can be
loaded in Google Earth are, by necessity, very
low resolution. When the goal is to illustrate the
schematic massing of a city, these limitations
are acceptable, but not when the goal is to
understand the experience of moving through a
detailed world. A secondary problem is that the

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computer models, by themselves, are essentially
raw data, lacking contextual material, subject
expert commentary, and textual analysis that
could make them engaging and effective tools for
teaching and learning.
The recent explosion of interest in online worlds,
mapping software, and three-dimensional
games is reinforcing both consumer interest in
three-dimensional worlds and the pressing need
for software to interrogate three-dimensional
content created to rigorous academic standards.
While there are many different types of software
and online opportunities for interacting with
three-dimensional computer models, nothing
currently available addresses the unique
requirements of humanities scholars and
students. What is needed is a concerted effort
to move these research projects successfully
from the research lab to mainstream scholarship
and pedagogy across the disciplines.
This
presentation will discuss efforts at UCLA
by Drs. Lisa M. Snyder and Scott
Friedman to leverage existing and new
modeling work for broad pedagogical use
by creating a real-time software interface
and content repository to provide a
mechanism for exploring highly detailed
three-dimensional models in educational
settings.
The first phase of the project, currently
underway, is the creation of generalized
and extensible run-time software that
will allow real-time exploration of highly
detailed, three-dimensional computer models
in both formal and informal educational
settings.
This run-time software will
address the greatest challenge for
building knowledge through use of
three-dimensional computer models by
providing scholars and educators the
mechanism to explore, annotate, craft
narratives, and build arguments within
the three-dimensional space
– in essence,
facilitating the creation of virtual learning
environments that can be broadly disseminated
to educators and learners across grade levels
and humanities disciplines. This software will
also allow the raw computer models to be
used as the basis for constructivist learning
activities, so that students can actively engage
with the content to build knowledge by creating
a personalized virtual learning environment.
This effort will provide an innovative way for
scholars, students, and the general public alike
to interrogate academically generated three-
dimensional content. Scholars will be able to
expand their own knowledge through interactive
exploration of the modeled environment, and,
using the proposed authoring tools, develop
their own arguments and class presentations
within the virtual space. By capitalizing on
student interest in three-dimensional content
as evidenced by the popularity of online worlds
and mapping programs, this new software will
expose students to academically vetted content,
encourage them to develop critical thinking
skills about the historic reconstruction process,
and provide an alternative to the traditional
classroom methods for examining the built
environment. Lifelong learners will also be able
to access the content and build their own
knowledge about past cultures. The availability
of the proposed software will also create
opportunities to leverage existing modeling
projects by providing a mechanism for sharing
content, and encourage new work that can take
advantage of the new run-time software.
The educational promise of digital computer
environments has yet to be realized, largely
because past efforts have focused on the short-
term constructivist benefits of the process for
the academic development team. As a result, a
great deal of content has been developed but
is unavailable for general use. The proposed
repository and administrative front end that
constitutes the second phase of the project
will facilitate submission of this scholar-created
content,
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allow the aggregation of multi-media
support material, and provide incentives for
contributors to share their data. In addition
to providing them access to the open source
software, this administrative front end would
ensure that content contributors are given
proper credit for their work, and provide them a
mechanism to control how they distribute their
content and charge for their work.
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1. Background
UCLA has a long history with three-dimensional
computer modeling and on the development
of real-time software for exploration of virtual
environments. Given this long history, work
on various fronts has been building to the
development of this run-time software and

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content repository since 1996. The idea for
an educational repository for real-time content
was promoted in Snyder’s 2003 dissertation
and was based on discussions with Dr.
Scott Friedman (UCLA Academic Technologies
Services) in the preceding years. Work on
computer reconstructions of historic urban
environments has been conducted through the
Urban Simulation Team at UCLA since 1996 and
through the Experiential Technologies Center
(the successor lab to the CVRLab) since 1997.
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2. The authors
Dr. Lisa M. Snyder has been a member of
the Urban Simulation Team since 1996. She
is also the associate director for outreach
and operations for the UCLA Experiential
Technologies Center which operates under
UCLA’s Academic Technology Services and the
Institute for Digital Research and Education.
Her research is focused on the educational use
of interactive computer environments. Through
the UST, she developed the real-time simulation
models of the Herodian and Umayyad Temple
Mount site now installed at the Davidson Center
in Jerusalem (see Figures 8-19) and is currently
working on the computer reconstruction of the
World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 (see
Figures 1-7).
Dr. Scott Friedman is a computer scientist
with UCLA’s Academic Technology Services
and, since 1994, has been the principal
developer of the Urban Simulation Team’s
software systems. Friedman participated in
the NSF funded Virtual World Data Server
project. His role in that project focused
on integrating an Urban Simulator client
into that system to support multiple users
and very large data sets. He specializes
in multimedia systems, interfaces for three-
dimensional environments, and distributed
computing. His 2003 dissertation focused on
“The Pixelcluster: Real-time visualization using
a cluster of commodity workstations.”
3. Funding
This work is being supported by UCLA’s
Academic Technology Services/Institute for
Digital Research and Education and the
National Endowment for the Humanities.

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Figures 1-5. Screen snapshots taken from the real-time
visual simulation model of the Herodian Temple Mount
developed jointly by the Urban Simulation Team at UCLA
and the Israel Antiquities Authority. From top to bottom:
the Temple Mount; the north/south Roman road and
Robinson’s Arch; on the platform; in the Royal Stoa; a
view of the Second Temple from within the Royal Stoa.
References
The Experiential Technologies Center
(2005-2010).
The Experiential Technologies
Center, University of California, Los Angeles.
http://www.etc.ucla.edu/
(accessed 12 March
2010).
Friedman, S.
(2004). The Pixelcluster: Real-
time visualization using a cluster of commodity
workstations. Dissertation University of
California, Los Angeles.
Koller, D., Frischer, B., Humphreys, G.
(2009). 'Research challenges for digital archives
of 3D cultural heritage models'.
Journal of
Computing and Cultural Heritage.
2(3):
article 7
.
http://portal.acm.org/citation.
cfm?id=1658346.1658347
(accessed 12 March
2010: via ACM Portal, UCLA).
Snyder, L.
(2003). The design and
use of experiential instructional technology
for the teaching of architectural history
in American undergraduate architecture
programs. University of California, Los Angeles,
Dissertation.
The Urban Simulation Team at UCLA
(1997-2010).
The Urban Simulation Team,
University of California, Los Angeles.
http://w
ww.ust.ucla.edu/ustweb/ust.html
(accessed 12
March 2010).
Notes
1.
Pre-visualization modeling and rendering is now commonplace
at both the professional level and in architecture schools.
2.
Computer modeling has been embraced by the Computer
Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA)
community, with a broad range of projects that showcase
computer modeling.
3.
Research questions within the modeling environment might
include viewshed analysis, reconstruction alternatives, and
placement of statuary.
4.
This type of content repository has precedent in the ‘Great
Buildings’ series created in the mid-1990s. It was also a central
element of Snyder’s doctoral dissertation, and the proposal of
Koller et al. to archive computer models of cultural heritage
sites.
5.
This is an important feature in that it would allow content
providers the opportunity to generate a revenue stream to
support ongoing development and help to make large-scale
modeling projects self-sustaining.
6.
Models constructed through the UCLA Experiential
Technologies Center include the NEH-funded model of
Karnak, John Dagenais’ reconstruction model of the
Romanesque Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, Diane
Favro’s work on ancient Rome, new student work underway
in Egypt under the direction of Willeke Wendrich (including
models of Fayuum and Saqqara). Work through the Urban
Simulation Team includes the Snyder’s model of the World’s
Columbian Exposition of 1893 and reconstructions of the
Temple Mount in Jerusalem in both the first and eighth
centuries.