Abstract
Metaverse platforms are becoming an increasingly popular form of collaboration within virtual worlds. Such platforms provide users with the ability to build virtual worlds that can simulate real-life experiences through different social activities. In the paper, we introduce a novel platform that provides assistive tools for building an educational experience in virtual worlds and overcoming the boundaries caused by pandemic situations. Therefore, the authors developed a high-level software architecture and design for a metaverse platform named VoRtex. VoRtex is primarily designed to support collaborative learning activities with the virtual environment. It is designed to support educational standards and it represents an open-source accessible solution developed using modern technology stack and metaverse concepts. For this study, we conducted a comparative analysis of the implemented VoRtex prototype and some popular virtual world platforms using Mannien’s matrix. Afterwards, based on the comparison, we evaluated the potential of the chosen virtual world platform and the VoRtex platform for online education. After an interactive demonstration of the VoRtex platform, participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire form. The aim was to enable participants to identify the main advantages of online teaching using the VoRtex platform. Finally, the authors analyzed benefits and disadvantages of collaborative learning between the metaverse platform and real-world classroom sessions.
Highlights
IntroductionPeople have used various technologies to adapt education to modern mediums
Over the years, people have used various technologies to adapt education to modern mediums
Related work solutions are lacking features required by the educational standard and our goal with this paper is to provide free open-source solutions accessible to every university using modern technology stack and metaverse concepts to enable a user-friendly interface that can be afforded by any student and teacher using moderate personal computers (PC) equipment
Summary
People have used various technologies to adapt education to modern mediums. Online learning using personal computers (PC) and mobile devices has become very popular in the last few years. Modern learning platforms include sharing, monitoring, personalized experience, and different client applications (desktop, mobile, web-based) for accessing the content. New mediums that we can use for online learning such as metaverse or virtual worlds (VWs) platforms are emerging. We can define VWs as follows: “Simulated persistent space based on the interaction with a computer, inhabited by several users, who are represented by iconic images called avatars, who can communicate with each other in a synchronized way” [1]. For building VWs, we can use software development tools such as game engines. Game engines provide basic building blocks (rendering, object manipulation, scripting, and other computer graphics features) for VW development. Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) are VWs that provide a richer collaborative arena for social encounters and community building
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
