It's a weekday morning at the University of Central Florida, inside a building that's part of the Institute for Simulation & Training. A puppeteer — clad in a black bodysuit outfitted with white, ball-like sensors — sits before a computer terminal. She moves her limbs, mimics a voice and takes on the persona of a disruptive student.
Her movements animate an avatar— a cartoon-like student — sitting in a virtual classroom on the screen. Tapping a key, the puppeteer becomes the persona of one disruptive student, then another.
Hundreds of miles away, a teacher-in-training sits before another computer screen. From her end, she sees not the puppeteer, but rather only the misbehaving students. Her job: Keep them on task, as a professor at the prospective teacher's school monitors the training.
This new virtual approach to preparing teachers for real-life classroom challenges — now being used at 10 teaching colleges — is just one experiment under way at the UCF institute.
Read Virtual Reality Check at UCF and see recent news from The National Center for Simulation.