Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Field Trip

Today's field trip to the Four Eyes Lab in the Computer Science Department and the Media Arts and Technology Program was really an exciting and eye-opening experience. Through the presentation and demonstration of the professor and his research team, I got to know briefly about their current work on computer vision and imaging, perceptual interfaces, multimodal interaction, human-computer interaction, gesture recognition, and artificial intelligence. I felt both good and bad at the same time when I walked into the 3-story high chamber of the amazing AlloSphere and got captivated immediately like a kid in the Disneyland. In this spherical space providing fully immersive, interactive, stereoscopic, and virtual environments, I felt so good when I looked around with a pair of 3D glasses and tried to hold back my hand from reaching out and attempting to catch an "atom" flowing towards my face; and I felt bad for not knowing much about all these dazzling technologies and not even knowing about the existence of such incredible facilities on the very campus I came to almost every day.

Excited by the prospect these technologies would bring, I couldn't help but think about the language education issue I mostly concern about. Can we use videos or the computational photographing technique introduced today to take pictures of whatever place and country we are interested in to create a virtual 3D immersion environment in a place like the AlloSphere to help language learners practice language skills while experiencing the real life of another country without actually being there? 



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