Internet Based Simulation And Virtual City For Engineering Education

This paper presents the results of integrating a virtual city into the ongoing program “Sooner City” at the University of Oklahoma. One of the objectives of the “Sooner City” program is to develop multiple multimedia modules over a series of basic courses to help civil engineering students better understand engineering topics and how they are integrated together in a real engineering task. In order to aid students in visually understanding the 'Big Picture', a 3D virtual city is built over the web by integrating the results of all the simulations. The virtual city is viewable on the Internet so that they and others can see their design ideas in a graphically correct 3D view. The virtual city concept also allows the engineering students to learn design with a true 3D perspective without the high cost of actually building the design (which is actually not possible with many engineering topics such as buildings). Both the steel structure module and the surveying module are discussed in this paper. Interactivity in these modules is emphasized using simulation, animation, sound, and CGI. The students use these two modules by reading the information sections, which include text and relevant graphics, and exploring the simulations. The virtual city integrates the simulations and the 3D virtual world into one environment. The simulations work as interfaces of the virtual city and the results of the simulations are visually showed in the 3D virtual city, which means that the virtual city is not fixed and can be updated and changed. To develop the virtual city and the multimedia modules, Internet technologies such as Shockwave, CGI-Perl, JavaScript, and VRML were employed.