The Serious Games and Virtual Worlds team activities focus on the increasingly important medium of virtual worlds and the application/development of video games technologies in a range of domains. The research within the team is currently focused on Experiential Based Learning in Virtual environments, VLE\Virtual World Integration, Hardware\Virtual World Integration and Optimal Hardware Architectures for Gaming Applications. The team works closely with industry and is an academic partner with Emergent Technologies which provides access to next generation game development tools (Gamebryo Engine) for teaching and research.

Team Members

Michael Callaghan (Team leader)

Dr Jim Harkin

Dr Shane Wilson

Ms Kerri McCusker

Mr Julio Lopez Losada

Ms Delia Millán Martínez

Mr Jim Murray

Mr Gavin McLaughlin

Mr Darragh Lydon

Engineering Education Island Virtual World Project

The Engineering Education Island project in Second Life investigates the effectiveness of 3D immersive virtual worlds for engineering education using experiential based learning in the context of undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. The Island is comprises a virtual laboratory which houses large scale interactive simulations and demonstrations, a virtual lecture theatre for teaching  and remote collaborative meeting facilities for group work.

This virtual world project and interactive demonstrations facilitates the following

• Demonstrate how Engineering material can be taught using new and highly interactive platforms.
• Allow users to create and customize their own avatars on a virtual island
• Allow users to participate in group activities and collaborative working
• Allow users to interact with engineering related teaching material
• Raise awareness of the potential uses of virtual worlds for education and industry

The main objectives of the project are to;

1. Investigate the effectiveness of a learner centered approach to teaching in this context where traditional web based resources are augmented by the use of virtual worlds.
2. Investigate how virtual learning environments (Moodle) and virtual worlds (Second Life) can be integrated to harness the effective strengths of each platform i.e. the course management features of virtual learning environments and the interactivity/immersiveness facilitated by virtual worlds in the creation of complex/highly interactive simulations.  
3. Investigate how virtual worlds can be linked to the real world and capture data which can be visualized and manipulated in near real time inside the virtual world.

Engineering Education Island Second Life Project

Fetch, Execute and Decode Cycle of a CPU: Engineering Education Island Second Life

For more information on this project please contact

Michael Callaghan
Serious Games and Virtual Worlds research team
Intelligent Systems Research Center
University of Ulster