What can students learn in artificial environments?

What can students learn in artificial environments that they cannot learn in class?
William Winn, University of Washington.

For several years, our research group has been studying how students learn in complex, computer-supported, artificial environments. These environments use the technologies of virtual reality to immerse students in a virtual world. Figures 1 – 3 show how. Rather than interacting with the computer using a monitor, keyboard and mouse, the student wears a helmet that contains a small screen for each eye, allowing stereoscopic viewing. The helmet shows images of virtual objects, in three dimensions, created by the computer. The helmet is tracked by means of an electromagnetic sensor. Changes in the position of the student's head are fed into the computer, which calculates the new view to display in the helmet, based on where the student is now looking. The overall effect is that the student can "look around" in the artificial environment just as in the real world. The track-and-draw loop operates about 15 times a second, which is half the frequency with which television pictures are created. Nonetheless, the effect is of reasonably smooth motion. In some cases, sounds are presented using earphones in the helmet. [continued]