California State Parks – Virtual State Parks initiative

California State Parks

California State Parks manages more than 270 park units, which contain an impressive collection of natural, cultural, and recreational resources to be found within California. Thus, State Parks mission is to educate children about California’s natural and cultural resources.

The State Parks School Program aims at breaking a new ground in the area of Educational applications while teaching and entertaining at the same time. Different programs are using edutainment to share the wealth of California history with students. One the most popular one is called Fort Ross, representing an historical part of the Californian history: realistic reconstitution of the Fort Ross and its occupation by the Russians in the 19th century. Students and Parents re-enact the time period during 1820 at the Fort itself. They stay for 3 days and wear the vintage costumes and role play real people from that time period.

The Application

The goal of the project is to provide school-age children with virtual access to the dynamic California State Parks System so that they may experience a significant period in the state’s history.

The application is similar to the Fort Ross program, but as a virtual experience. This pilot program is indeed demonstrating an educational multiplayer learning tool.

Through the use of the Virtual State Parks Initiative, students have the opportunity to experience educational content and “roleplay” in a multi-user online environment. The project allows users to create their online world and select characters and roleplays with other users while developing social interactions. This new “social group” shares similar informational experiences and this common interest b
rings the player back to visit each other for a common purpose. Players will be able to communicate in character by dialoguing in text boxes, and they can also take part in chats on the simulation’s chat boards. In the pilot phase, between 15 and 30 students are able to play at once. Students at different locations will be connected by a networked system. They will play the application on PCs, controlling the action either by keyboards or joy pads.

The Challenge

State Parks mission is to educate children about California’s natural and cultural resources. As edutainment is the main goal they want to achieve while creating applications, interactivity is an important requirement in the project. Children indeed learn by interacting directly with the subject matter and with their peers. Finally, California State Parks needed the possibility to easily create a highly interactive application capable of managing a multi-user mode and deploy it either on networked PCs or in an immersive environment.

Solution

Virtools was used as the primary interactive software for its quick learning curve and user friendliness while achieving the two main goals: nteractivity and targeting the internet multiplayer arena. Virtools was integrated in California State Parks range of tools and worked in coordination to their 3D architecture and landscape of the parks technology that they created in their architectural section.

Benefits

This ambitious role-play history simulation gives school children the opportunity to virtually act in an important historical period of the state while being immersed in a realtime 3D networked environment. Virtools enabled California State Parks to create a real-time, fully interactive, and visually stunning 3D networked environment.

Solutions used by the Client

For this application, California State Parks used a solution combining Virtools Dev, the interactive 3D content development platform, along with the Virtools Server, managing the multi-user part, and the VR Pack for a seamless deployment on immersive environments. On the modeling and animation side, Discreet 3ds max 6 (www.discreet.com) was chosen, as well as advanced animation plugins from Di-o-Matic (www.di-o-matic.com)
especially for lyp-synchronization.

Key Benefits

• Deeper user learning capabilities thanks to fluid interactivity.
• Multi-user 3D content with collaborative gaming.
• Realistic rendering and high-level interactivity for simulating effective communication.