InVEnTA is a University of Exeter Education Incubator project using geospatial & visualisation technology to develop free-roaming interactive virtual environments. See our 2 min feature video:

Project Summary:

The InVEnTA project embraces the recent advances in geospatial and visualisation technologies to develop a software tool for efficiently producing ‘free roaming’ immersive Interactive Virtual Environments (IVEs).

3D data from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), kite-based photography, handheld cameras (for smaller areas) or existing online spatial datasets can form the basis for interactive, immersive virtual representations of real-world environments for teaching and learning. Educational content in the form of text, photos, sound, and videos can be easily embedded within the environment, to suit the learning objectives.

Project Concept:

InVEnTA consists of two separate ‘apps’ – a ‘Creator app’ and a ‘Viewer app’.  The workflow in schematic ‘A’ below shows how an educator can create a IVE by embedding educational/learning content to be experienced by multiple learners. This forms the ‘engaged knowledge acquisition’ application.

InVEnTA has been designed so that it can also be used in an ‘active knowledge construction’ setting ‘B’. In this model of use, learners use the Creator app to build their own unique IVE by adding their own content. These can then be assessed by an educator or shared with peers via the viewer app.