For release: Nov. 16,
2002
Contacts:
Whitney Sanford,
Dept. of Religion, 515-294-6018; wsanford@iastate.edu
Carolina Cruz-Neira, VRAC, 515-294-5685; carolina@vrac.iastate.edu
Robert Mills, Public Affairs, 515-294-1113; rmills@iastate.edu
VIRTUAL REALITY IN THE HUMANITIES:
VIRTUAL HINDU RITUAL
Religious education tool demonstrated
at SC2002 conference,
Booth #R3111
BALTIMORE - A prototype of a virtual
re-creation of a Hindu ritual is being demonstrated in Iowa State University's
Virtual Reality Applications Center booth #R3111 at the SC2002 conference.
The simulation, designed as a tool for education about religious and cultural
traditions, presents the story of a Hindu devotional ritual in a temple, complete
with worshippers, priests and music. The application is being shown on a new
low-cost, four-screen virtual reality system.
Whitney Sanford, an associate professor of philosophy
and religion at ISU and a teacher of world religion, is one of the developers
of the system. "Some of the impetuous for this project came because I'd like to take my students
to certain places in India, but can't," she said. "With this technology, I can immerse students in a temple and ritual and teach
them about ritual as performance, use of space, sacred architecture, iconography
and so on," she said. "I can teach better by taking students somewhere than by standing in front of
them lecturing."
For co-developer Carolina Cruz-Neira, VRAC associate
director and an ISU professor of industrial engineering and manufacturing,
the application presented its own challenges. "It was important that this application be highly realistic," she said. "There's a lot of technology required to achieve this goal. Indeed, some of the
technology we've developed for this application will be useful in our other
work, such as military simulations." This immersive VR application is just one of many that Cruz-Neira has developed
in the arts and humanities.
The simulation is based on the Radharaman Temple
in Vrindavan, India, where Sanford does fieldwork. It includes a detailed 3-D
model of the marble and
sandstone temple, created using video and photographs as reference. Worshippers
and priests, dressed in colorful robes, move around inside the temple as
the ritual progresses. "We
spent a lot of time getting the details right," Sanford said. Since it's a full 3-D, interactive application, the viewpoint
of the user can be moved to any location at any time.
A group of talented ISU students, including
Sarah Kabala, James Allen, Alan Fischer and Moon Ho Park, developed the application
under guidance from Sanford and Cruz-Neira. "They're learning a lot, not only about creating VR applications but also about
religion, so they know what the various aspects of the simulation means," Sanford said.
The work being shown at SC2002 is an abbreviated
version of the complete ritual. "For one thing, we'd like to expand it to about 20 minutes," Sanford said, adding that the way characters act and look will also be refined.
The team also has plans to enhance the simulation beyond the ritual itself.
For instance, explanatory "portals" will be added to allow participants to dig deeper for background information
about the ritual and religion.
Sanford and Cruz-Neira are also interested in
applying the ideas behind this simulation to education in general. "Ultimately, with this concept of digital storytelling - creating narratives where
people go into a site or an historical place - we can create an entire new
generation of immersive scenarios that can be used in a variety of disciplines," Sanford said, including cultural education, technical training, medical scenarios,
military simulations, and language learning. "We think we can start to develop a new mode of communicating information to students
and having them participate in it," she said.
Images and more information about the virtual
Hindu ritual can be found on the Web at http://www.vrac.iastate.edu/research/sites/htemple/.
The virtual temple is just one of dozens of
virtual reality applications being developed at VRAC. The center is actively
creating tools to enable science, engineering, humanities and art disciplines
to apply emerging technologies in visualization and computing to their areas
of interest. VRAC is home to approximately $10 million in contract research
with leading industry and government organizations. The center is also playing
a critical role in ISU's initiative to become a world leader in the burgeoning
field of human-computer interaction. It is part of the Institute for Physical
Research and Technology, a network of research and outreach programs at ISU.
For more information, visit VRAC on the Web at http://www.vrac.iastate.edu.
