oa A Whale Shark Virtual Reality Underwater Environment

Background Virtual Reality (VR) can provide an immersive experience and enables users to live in different worlds. The technology becomes affordable with the recent development in VR technology and the release of many consumers VR Head Mounted Display (HMD). VR provides a unique and efficient way of exploration and learning. The available VR systems, so far, provides seated experience where the user uses gamepad or joystick to navigate and interact. In this work, we are proposing a walking VR immersive experience where the user will be able to walk naturally and interact in the virtual world. This achieved by using cameras to track user movements. As a result, the participant will be able to lively experience the underwater live and be able to have an enjoyable learning space. Approach Recently, we developed a bilingual animal domain knowledge base (ontology) where information are stored in a hierarchical structure based on the classifications of the animals (e.g., mammal, aquatic, etc.). The knowledge base defines the relationship between the classifications (concepts). Each concept can have different properties which describe all viable facts that can be associated with. Each property can have specific settings (e.g., multiplicity, restriction, etc.). For instance, the animal cannot have two different blood types (i.e., this can be restricted using multiplicity). In this work, we propose a VR whale shark educational system that presents whale sharks and diverse kind of aquatic animals. The system extracts informative facts from the knowledge base and attaches them to the generated 3D models. The VR simulation provides the ability to walk in the world by tracking the movements of the user using cameras. The result is fully immersive VR-based simulation. The aim of the proposed system is to improve the educational skills about whale sharks and underwater environment which includes comprehension, realization, and deduction. Results Previous mobile based educational system have been developed and showed significant improvements for learners. The features of the proposed educational system include: 1) presentation of illustrations for natural text, 2) knowledge extraction from an animal domain knowledge base, 3) getting illustrations (i.e., 2D and 3D images) from a multimedia repository; and 4) querying online search engine to get new images. Our ongoing system development includes the development of a VR system for Whale shark and underwater environment. Conclusions The study presents a virtual reality educational system for whale sharks and underwater environment. An animal domain knowledge base will be used to extract semantic information about aquatic animals. The proposed system provides immersive VR with ability to walk and navigate.