ReefWorld
- Education, Entertainment and Research in a Virtual Reef Environment
Project summary
In brief, the ReefWorld idea proposes to design and generate a virtual, 3D continually persistent online version of the Australian Great Barrier Reef. Accessible by users globally, and designed to facilitate education, entertainment, public awareness on ecological issues and scientific research, reefworld will form a nexus the education in and study of the marine sciences. It will combine the latest multimedia technologies to deliver interactive, high-quality immersive experiences. Streamed directly from Australia, reefworld will be accessible by everyone with a broadband connection. Via enabling scientists worldwide to run scenarios in reefworld, the virtual environment will form a vital research resource
The Great Barrier Reef is a natural wonder of our world, and a registered unesco World Heritage site. It enjoys a high degree of conservation and management effort. It is visited by millions of tourists every year, and forms an immense research laboratory for marine scientists from the entire world. Being part of the Indo-Pacific biodiversity hotspot, the Great Barrier Reef is essential to the continued survival of the tropical marine fauna. It is therefore of perennial interest to not only preserve it, but also educate the Australian and international population in its importance and fascinating life, and finally it is vital to scientific studies of marine life and the effects of global warming on the marine ecosystem. Designing an online world is a major task, and the project has therefore been broken down into four stages.
Disclosure note: Initial thoughts on the ReefWorld idea has been assembled in a brief design document. I cannot cannot share this freely on the internet due to Intellectual Property issues. If you would like to get a copy of the material, please contact me for a non-disclosure agreement, which I will need signed before releasing the document.
A tour of reefworld
In a classroom somewhere in the world, a teacher overlooks her class, who have logged into the main website of reefworld. The image of a tour guide appears, streamed life from the Reef Headquarters in Townsville, welcoming the class to their reef experience. After introducing the tour, the guide activates the interface to reefworld, and the students now find themselves represented by an avatar, a representation in the shape of a reef fish. They can move freely, exploring the inhabitants of the virtual reef just as if they were actually scuba diving at the Great Barrier Reef. Their avatars can interact with the surroundings. The tour guide warns them not to get too close to a moray eel, as it may eat them! (upon which the avatar instantly reappears). Each avatar is supplied a shrimp, a small, interactive, automated program in the shape of a colorful reef shrimp, which prior to the tour has been activated to help schoolchildren of the appropriate age category with their questions and inquiries. Via simple artificial intelligence routines, the shrimp responds to the inquiries of the children, adjusting the complexity of responses or information shown according to user input.
While the tour guide, now in the form of a big grouper, swims ahead, he tells the children what to look for, and highlights interesting features. Approaching a coral, he activates a video sequence that appears in a small window on each of the students’ monitors, showing a bit of video footage from the Great Barrier Reef of the coral. Meanwhile, the teacher oversees the touring school of “fish”, teleporting stray children to the appropriate section of the reef as necessary or limiting the space they can move in, ensuring everyone follows the tour guide. After the tour, the children are set free to roam the reef, looking for answered to questions the teacher has given them prior to entering reefworld, based on material supplied by the reefworld education unit.
At he same time, a team of disabled children are putting on virtual reality equipment at the Reef Headquarters, which enables them to swim freely on the virtual currents, while a tour guide tells them about the life around them.
At a university in Europe, a group of university students are studying the life cycles of occelaris clownfish, programming changing environmental factors and sea anemone availability, using the simple yet versatile real-time editing software of reefworld, to see how this affects the dynamics of the clownfish population.
In Brisbane, a team of marine scientists is testing a hypothesis for coral response to global warming on a shard, a temporary copy, of reefworld. Another team in Boston is running an analysis of the effects of decreased mangrove coverage in reefworld itself, while a third team in Hawaii is studying theoretical physics by programming schools of fish with advanced behavioral algorithms.
reefworld overview
This project idea proposes to utilize advanced multimedia technologies to generate a virtual, persistent representation of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in 3D, a multi-audience knowledge product entitled reefworld. Based on tried technologies and principles, but utilizing the latest developments in advanced multimedia file formats, the virtual representation will present an opportunity to visit the Great Barrier Reef to anyone with a broadband internet connection – globally – functioning to raise global public awareness of the environmental challenges facing the coral reefs today and in the future.
It will allow marine scientists worldwide to perform experiments and test theories that would never be possible in real life, such as introducing a temperature increase, an ice age or even a chemical spill from a tanker ship, and study the response of the reef - without harming a single marine organism.
The technological industries and academia of Australia will be able to develop and test new, novel multimedia technologies directly in the virtual system. As an educational tool, a persistent, virtual reef world system, running 24 hours a day from servers in Australia and streamed directly to the users, will be of direct use at all levels of education, and will be in the absolute forefront of developments in electronic education (e-education); serving also as a testing ground for new educational technologies. Users, whether tourists in Australia or people anywhere else, will be able to log on globally, taking on the role as marine organisms, take guided tours or study the life of the reef for school and university projects. Users will be able to immerse themselves in the wonders of the Great Barrier Reef, learning about the coral reef environment and being entertained at the same time. Disabled people will be able to don virtual reality equipment and go for a virtual swim, in an environment they would never be able to access in real life. And these are just examples, the range of uses for a multi-user learning and research environment are virtually infinite.
Objectives of the reefworld project
The total range of purposes that reefworld could be utilized for is vastly out of scope of this document, and therefore the view of the project adopted here will be top-down. A project the size of reefworld would normally initially focus on developing a general, working version of the virtual reef which addresses a selected range of core purposes. This is to prevent over-featuring, the process of adding too many options and possibilities to an electronic program, which leads to user confusion and budget dissolution. Future development and design will gradually be able to expand on the core design, further building on the versatility of the virtual reef system.
The three core objectives of the reefworld project are the following:
1) Invent, develop, test and generate new ways of experiencing the coral reef environment for all age groups globally. This in facilitating:A) Education in reef life and issues related to tropical marine reefs, such as biodiversity and conservation; B) By providing an entertaining way of learning about these subjects, i.e. edutainment, for both educational and recreational purposes.
2) Address the concerns of the globally threatened coral reefs, which faces rapid decline due to the effects of global warming and human impact. This by facilitating global public awareness on the coral reef environment, its importance and the threats facing it.
3) Utilize the Australian research, education and technical strengths to advance the Australian marine sciences, electronic education expertise and the creative & communication industries and research community.
In other words, the reefworld will address important needs of the public, the academic community, tourists, the government, technical industry and reef management institutions jointly, as this will ensure the versatility of the virtual world system, and generate a substantial secondary synergy effect between the involved partners. The project will directly link the academic and industrial worlds, facilitating and promoting such partnerships during the project and in the future.
Figure 1: Core purpose areas of the reefworld project and the corresponding audience target group.
The project will address the purposes by focusing on four different audience groups [Figure 1, yellow]. Each of the audience groups has relations to the purposes, but of a varying nature. For instance, in relation to the general public, it is not the ability to conduct scientific experiments that is of interest, but rather the ability of reefworld to educate and entertain, thereby promoting knowledge about the reef, thus raising public awareness of reef related subjects such as global warming. As each audience group has specific needs, reefworld has to be constructed as a multi-user knowledge product.
For further information on ReefWorld and the thoughts behind the project,
please contact me for a more comprehensive report.
