Development of a Virtual Environment for Environmental Monitoring Education

This paper presents details design and considerations to pilot an educational virtual environment (VE) development. The environment is designed for Freshman engineering students to achieve learning objectives regarding (1) engineering model understanding and prediction, and (2) experimental setup in the context of environmental education. Human computer interaction (HCI) methods are used to inform the design of the virtual environment of the existing physical site through user task analysis. Environmental data is displayed to exhibit the inverse relationship between two water quality parameters to the students. The virtual environment is provided through the use of a smart phone based head-worn display (HWD). Students reported being distracted, which are mostly due to hardware constraints (n = 14).