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Life in the Virtual Trenches

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Incorporating the World’s Vast Treasure Trove of Historical Knowledge

On the tacit side, the developers worked with a historical domain expert who brought an authentic and fully functional M1897 French 75 to Shenandoah University (the SCIL lab is housed in a former U.S. National Guard armory). They were able to take numerous photos, scans, and measurements and actually fire the gun.

On the explicit knowledge side, there was no lack of historical documents from which to draw. In fact, there were too many. Just for fun, put on your KM hat and do an online search for accounts of the battle. Armed with an array of text analytics and other tools in our KM armory many of these documents can be ingested analyzed, and pieced together to produce a series of eyewitness accounts. These can be used to formulate a variety of scenarios and real-life immersive experiences. All of these experiences provide an added dimension previously unavailable to the average student or history buff. It especially brings to life the oft-forgotten, deeply personal stories of many of the lower-rank soldiers who served on the front lines.

Still, many of the documents have not yet been digitized, including over 500 boxes of textual records, reports, and correspondence. All for one 47-day battle. Considering that every nation has similar storehouses of historical knowledge waiting to be tapped, this represents just the tip of the iceberg.

Think of the Possibilities

SCIL has been busy creating many other immersive learning environments, such as for assembling and testing industrial-grade drones. And forget about listening to endless debates about the U.S. Electoral College from poorly informed talking heads on the satellite news channels. Instead, SCIL will help transport you back in time so you can be a fly on the wall and listen in on the original debates as they happened almost 240 years ago (su.edu/blog/2024/09/20/shenandoah-university-to-launch-the-great-experiment). This sure beats reading about it in a textbook or an editorial opinion page.

The applications in education are obvious. But you can build use cases for almost any domain. Remember the old People Express Management Flight Simulator? Created in 1988 by Professor John Sterman at the MIT Sloan School of Management, it was initially intro- duced as part of an orientation workshop for incoming grad students. Based on the real-life story of People Express Airlines, the simulator let you start up and run your own airline, either taking it into the stratosphere or running it into the ground. All of this is based on real-world data.

Ditto for The Beer Game supply chain simulation from the same group at MIT and still available in various forms today. But these flat, 1- and 2D environments have become woefully archaic. Imagine what you can build when you combine AR/VR technology with generative/ extractive AI and machine learning, drawing upon the virtually unlimited resources available in the world’s online knowledge repositories.

Job opportunities for knowledge workers abound. Building an immersive environment takes a crew very similar to a professional video production. Roles that were used in building the M1897 French 75 immersive learning environment included producer, lead developer, 3D modeler, software developer, sound design engineer, project coordinator, domain/subject matter expert, and historical research and reference librarian/ assistant.

And don’t forget the widely popular and lucrative online gaming world. It’ s no coincidence that one of the nation’s prominent esports arenas (su.edu/esports/esports-arena) is collocated in the same building as SCIL, where they regularly host national events.

This is a rapidly growing field. Many universities, in addition to SU, offer undergraduate and graduate degrees in immersive environments, VR/AR design, esports engineering and management, and other related disciplines.

Anybody up for building immersive learning environments for KM training and certification?

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