Designing an educational metaverse: A case study of NTUniverse

Sim, J. K. et al. (2024) Designing an educational metaverse: A case study of NTUniverse. Applied Sciences, 14(6), 2559. (doi: 10.3390/app14062559)

Abstract

An up-and-coming concept that seeks to transform how students learn about and study complex systems, as well as how industrial workers are trained, metaverse technology is characterized in this context by its use in virtual simulation and analysis. In this work, a virtual environment is created that duplicates real-world situations and enables immersive and interactive learning in the educational metaverse. For this purpose, we built a digital twin of the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) campus as a foundation, called NTUniverse. It is designed as an educational metaverse in which various academic and analytical applications are digitized as 3D content embedded within this virtual campus. The approach to digitally twinning educational systems and embedding them within virtual campuses enables remote and collaborative learning as well as professional technical skills training. It also makes feasible the analysis of abstract concepts, complicated structures, dynamic processes, and sensitive industrial procedures virtually, which is otherwise challenging if not impossible to perform in the real world. The work offers important insights into the behaviors and interactions of systems in the metaverse by evaluating design choices and user interests. NTUniverse is an attempt to explore a novel approach that addresses remote education and training challenges. Three efforts with NTUniverse will be discussed in this work, including (1) digitalization of the NTU campus; (2) campus train modelling and simulation; and (3) science, technology, engineering and mathematics education.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: Funding: This project is partially support by The URECA Program with Nanyang Technological University and the Applied Research Accelerator Program with NVIDIA.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Cao, Dr Qi

Creator Roles

Cao, Q.: Formal analysis, Writing – review and editing

• Authors: Sim, J. K., Xu, K. W., Jin, Y., Lee, Z. Y., Teo, Y. J., Mohan, P., Huang, L., Xie, Y., Li, S., Liang, N., Cao, Q., See, S., Winkler, I., and Cai, Y.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• Journal Name: Applied Sciences
• Journal Abbr.: Appl. Sci.
• Publisher: MDPI
• ISSN: 2076-3417
• ISSN (Online): 2076-3417
• Copyright Holders: Copyright: © 2024 by the authors
• First Published: First published in Applied Sciences 14(6): 2559
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence