VirtualClassroom: A Lecturer-Centered Consumer-Grade Immersive Teaching System in Cyber–Physical–Social Space

Abstract

Lecturers, as the guidance of the classroom, play a significant role in the teaching process. However, the lecturers' sense of space immersion has been ignored in current virtual teaching systems. In this article, we explore the cyber-physicalsocial intelligence for Edu-Metaverse in cyber-physical-social space and specially design a lecturer-centered immersive teaching system, taking the social and lecturers' factors into consideration. We call this system VirtualClassroom (V-Classroom). Specifically, we first introduce the cyber-physical-social system (CPSS) paradigm of V-Classroom so that the workflow is standardized and significantly simplified, and the systems can be constructed with off-the-shelf hardware. The key component of V-Classroom is a cyber-world representation of a physical-world classroom instrumented with sparse consumer-grade RGBD cameras for capturing the 3-D geometry and texture of the classrooms. We provide each V-Classroom lecturer with a physical device for sending 6DoF view-change messages and showing view-dependent content of the remote classroom. Following the above paradigm, we develop the V-Classroom algorithms, including V-Classroom depth algorithm (V-DA) and V-Classroom view algorithm (V-VA), to achieve the real-time rendering of remote classrooms. V-DA is dedicated to recovering accurate depth information of the classrooms while V-VA is devoted to real-time novel view synthesis. Finally, we illustrate our implemented CPSS-driven V-Classroom prototype, based on real-world classroom scenarios we collected, and discuss the main challenges and future direction.

MetaEdu: a new framework for future education

“…Besides heated discussions on its benefits and potential applications [33], there are very few technological developments. The design of virtual classroom with commercial-grade software and hardware is presented by Shen et al to allow for a seamless connection between physical and virtual learning environments [34]. Hare and Tang focused their efforts on building a virtual learning environment and designing AI-enabled tutor NPCs to offer guided learning [10].…”

Guest Editorial: Cyber–Physical–Social Intelligence: Toward Metaverse-Based Smart Societies of 6I and 6S

“…For smart manufacturing, metaverse can help realize flexible manufacturing through real-virtual division of robotic workers, digital workers, and human workers, so as to improve the intelligence of manufacturing; for mining, metaverse can eliminate the impact of adverse weather and environmental conditions, and improve the efficiency and security of mining, so as to achieve high-efficiency, high-security mining in the physical world [8]; for oil, metaverse can improve the reliability and intelligence, so as to realize the safety, security, sustainability, sensitivity, service, and smartness of the oil field. In education field, metaverse can provide meaningful learning and training scenarios, immersive teaching environments, and smart service for learners, so as to enhance both individual and social aspects of learning [9]. Besides, metaverse has also been applied in agriculture [10], art, service [11], emergency management, scenarios engineering, defending, radar, etc.…”