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Climate change poses a real and present threat to cultural heritage. Responses to climate change have focussed on strategies for prevention and physical protection. Developments in technology have made possible a new type of virtual museum that actively supports the work of museums and enables the creation of immersive digital exhibits. This paper proposes that it is important to address the role that community museums play in the digital preservation of natural and cultural heritage. It focusses on the contribution of virtual museums and proposes a distributed virtual museum architecture to support digital preservation.The architecture addresses both the need for high quality local interactions that enables preservation and the need for a global infrastructure that makes the results accessible and enables the development of links between communities. Publisher PDF

This work discusses the methodology for the design, development and deployment of a virtual 19th-century Fish Curing Yard as an immersive museum installation. The museum building now occupies the same space where the curing yard was over 100 years prior, hence the deployment of a virtual reconstruction of the curing yard in a game engine enables the museum visitors to explore the virtual world from equivalent vantage points in the real world. The project methodology achieves the goal of maximising user experience for visitors while minimising cost for the museum, and focus group evaluations of the system revealed the success of the interaction-free design with snackable content. A major implication of the ndings is that museums can provide compelling and informative experiences that enable visitors to travel back in time with minimal interaction and relatively low cost systems. Postprint

This paper outlines the current state of learning, the problems arising and research needed by developers and educators using Virtual Worlds as an intelligent learning environment. Artificially intelligent avatars are required for virtual on-line problem and case based learning. However, the use of AI requires supportive frameworks, models and both staff and student goals. Natural simulations and avatar interactions are all part of the learning environment but realism, student paced learning, adaptive goals, natural language interaction, feedback and assessment are active goals for the next decade of virtual education research. Postprint

To understand the performance of networked computer systems it is necessary to consider client, server and network components. Virtual Worlds are resource intensive interactive systems. As such they are liable to degradations in system performance which have a negative impact upon users’ Quality of Experience (QoE). To efficiently use system resources it is necessary to understand when and how changes in Quality of Service (QoS) impact upon the QoE. This study investigates the factors that affect the performance of Open Virtual World Servers and how these impact upon users. It presents quantitative experimental results that establish factors which affect QoS performance and qualitative results of user QoE. The central research question asks ’to what extent can we identify easily measurable system properties that will enable us to make efficient use of server resources whilst preserving QoE? This paper identifies the Server Frame Time (SFT), the time taken by the server to create a frame, and Server Frames per Second (SFPS), the number of frames created by a server in a second, as key metrics which are easy to measure and relate directly to QoE. Most virtual world servers are allocated resources manually and this allocation is independent of the actual work load. As a result, server resources are under utilised due to variations in load. This approach causes a higher provisioning cost than is necessary. The study in this project establishes a way to determine the usability threshold. Based on this server resources can be tuned to provide appropriate QoE for users while making sure that they are utilised to their full potential. Postprint

Widespread adoption of mobile communications devices has led to people multiplexing their grounded reality, where they engage in face-to-face social interaction, with Web-based social networks and apps; concurrently emerging 3D Web technologies hold promise for networks of rich, parallel 3D synthetic environments to emerge. Current technologies allow the 2D Web to be multiplexed with grounded reality, resulting in PolySocial Reality, however 3D platforms suffer from the vacancy problem when the same is attempted. Cross Reality has been proposed to address this problem; but previous instantiations of the concept have used fixed links between grounded and synthetic environments in closed lab settings, limiting their utility for investigating PolySocial Reality. This paper presents an architecture and implementation to address this shortcoming, using a tablet computer and the Pangolin virtual world client to provide a mobile, location and orientation aware interface to spatially equivalent 3D synthetic environments. A use case is investigated in which this implementation is applied to improve upon accompanying materials at cultural heritage sites, augmenting traditional guide books and audio tours used by the general public and educational visits, with accuracy of GPS emerging as a constraint on modality of interaction possible. - See more at: http://summit.immersiveeducation.org/iED-2013-program.html#PAPERS Postprint

The use of immersive 3D virtual worlds for education continues to grow due to their potential for creating innovative learning environments and their enormous popularity with students. However, scalability remains a major challenge. Whereas MOOCs cope with tens of thousands of users downloading or streaming learning materials, the highly interactive, multi-user nature of virtual worlds is far more demanding - supporting even a hundred users in the same region at the same time is considered an achievement. However, if the normal number of concurrent users is relatively low and there is only an occasional need to have a large group in-world at the same time for a special event can the Cloud be used for supporting these high, but short-lived, peaks in demand? This paper develops a context for the deployment of immersive education environments in the Cloud and presents performance results of Cloud-based virtual world hosting. Postprint

The growth in the range of disciplines that Virtual Worlds support for educational purposes is evidenced by recent applications in the fields of cultural heritage, humanitarian aid, space exploration, virtual laboratories in the physical sciences, archaeology, computer science and coastal geography. This growth is due in part to the flexibility of OpenSim, the open source virtual world platform which by adopting Second Life protocols and norms has created a de facto standard for open virtual worlds that is supported by a growing number of third party open source viewers. Yet while this diversity of use-cases is impressive and Virtual Worlds for open learning are highly popular with lecturers and learners alike immersive education remains an essentially niche activity. This paper identifies functional challenges in terms of Management, Network Infrastructure, the Immersive 3D Web and Programmability that must be addressed to enable the wider adoption of Open Virtual Worlds as a routine learning technology platform. We refer to specific use-cases based on OpenSim and abstract generic requirements which should be met to enable the growth in use of Open Virtual Worlds as a mainstream educational facility. A case study of a deployment to support a formal education curriculum and associated informal learning is used to illustrate key points. Postprint

Virtual worlds are an important tool in modern education practices as well as providing socialisation, entertainment and a laboratory for collaborative work. This paper focuses on the uses of virtual worlds for education and synthesises over 100 published academic papers, reports and educational websites from around the world. A taxonomy is then derived from these papers, delineating current theoretical and practical work on virtual world usage, specifically in the field of education. The taxonomy identifies rich veins of current research and practice in associated educational theory and in simulated worlds or environments, yet it also demonstrates the paucity of work in important areas such as evaluation, grading and accessibility. Postprint

The project received start-up funding in the form of a University of St Andrews FILTA award The importance of specialist intervention in the form of humanitarian aid from governments, NGOs and other aid agencies during a humanitarian emergency cannot be over-emphasised. Humanitarian aid is the assistance provided in response to a humanitarian crisis. Humanitarian aid may be logistical, financial or material and its central aim is to alleviate human suffering and save lives. This paper describes an inter-disciplinary project that created the Virtual Humanitarian Disaster learning and teaching resource (VHD) that is centred on the events occurring in the aftermath of an earthquake. To facilitate learning, scenarios with integrated task dilemmas have been modelled which will provide the opportunity for users of the resource to explore the inter-relationships between the key areas of activities which are important to the NGOs and other bodies which deliver humanitarian aid. Such areas include geo-political relationships, legal and regulatory requirements, information management, logistic, financial and human resource management imperatives. The VHD is primarily aimed at students. It creates a more flexible learning and teaching environment when compared with traditional classroom methods. The resource enables students to make decisions concerning critical situations within the controlled environment of a virtual world, where the consequences of any wrong decisions, will not directly impact on lives and property. The VHD has been embedded within an undergraduate module of the School of Management as it specifically relates to the final thematic area within which the module engages, namely the strategic and operational challenges faced by NGOs operating in the “humanitarian relief industry”. We demonstrate that virtual worlds can be used to enhance learning and make it more engaging. The VHD affords students the opportunity to explore given scenarios in accordance with a specified budget and in so doing, they realise module outcomes in a more active and authentic learning environment. Postprint

The Chamber of Ideas is a virtual collaborative system designed to enhance the research experience for postgraduate students and academic staff at research universities, and to improve daily workflow efficiencies between researchers and support staff. It builds upon past literature and system development within the fields of e-Science and Computer- Supported Cooperative Work. Research is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, multi-institutional, and digital, all trends which have contributed to increased levels of collaboration between researchers. This shift toward greater collaboration has been incentivized by host research institutions, public funding bodies, and private sponsors. It has been largely enabled by the presence and rapid growth of the World Wide Web. As a platform, the World Wide Web provides a communication infrastructure capable of linking all researchers from all disciplines from all research institutions across the globe. Yet, a widely-adopted, federated, and ubiquitous Web-based service does not presently exist to satisfy the evolving collaborative workflow needs of today’s researchers. This thesis focuses on the University of St Andrews as a local case-study to present a technical blueprint and project roadmap for the design and introduction of a new system that can fill this niche. Requirements were elicited from university stakeholders regarding organizational workflows for knowledge transfer, research funding, researcher communication with support units, and interdisciplinary research between schools. Primary institutional stakeholders include the Knowledge Transfer Centre, St Leonard's College, Postgraduate Society, and Vice-Principal for Enterprise & Engagement. A prototype was designed and engineered to support user research management, research group coordination, and team project management, incorporating unique sets of collaborative tools for user, group, and work object system perspectives. The thesis proposes a new theoretical framework for Large-Scale Complex Research Institutions inspired by LSCIT System and ULS System literature, and introduces concepts of institutional genealogy and social research data for system preservation and curation.

The ultrafast dynamics in semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) relevant to all-optical switching have been studied by means of time-resolved spectroscopic experiments on a multiple quantum well InGaAs amplifier. The nonlinear light generation in Quantum Cascade (QC) lasers has also been a subject of research. The switching windows of a TOAD-like three-beam interferometric set-up, measured using 700 fs pulses in the 1.5 μm wavelength region, revealed an ultrafast feature (~ ps) dependent on the pulse energy of the pump beam. These dynamics, and the subsequent reshaping of the switching window edge, are attributed to refractive index changes in the SOA caused by ultrafast carrier heating, consistent with the predictions of a sliced propagation model based on rate equations. Counter-propagating sub-picosecond pulses were used to monitor gain saturation along the SOA waveguide at different wavelengths around the peak gain. The functional form of the spatial dependence of gain saturation is found to depend on pulse energy. These observations are interpreted by combining the optical nonlinearities associated with interband carrier dynamics and carrier heating together and their respective time constants. Aided by the rate-equation model, we show that the amplification of the pump as it propagates along the amplifier may lead to the saturation of a portion of the device and to an effective narrowing of the switching windows of a TOAD (even for pulse energies below 1 pJ). Particular attention is devoted to discussing the limit of full saturation across the entire SOA waveguide. Observation of stimulated electronic Anti-Stokes Raman emission in QC lasers is reported. We present four distinct designs of active regions with enhanced Anti-Stokes Raman nonlinearity. In all four, the pump laser is monolithically integrated with the non-linear region in a two-stack active core within the same waveguide. Stimulated electronic Raman emission was observed in samples of three of these designs. Additionally, for the designs with positive detuning, an incoherent up-conversion signal resulting from optical pumping is detected.