March 22, 2023
Alumni of the School of Computing and Information (SCI) are always up to amazing things! Recently, Maria Harrington, PhD (IS ’08) was invited to write a review paper of all of her work and findings over the past fourteen years. The paper, “Virtual Nature Makes Knowledge Beautiful” has been published in Frontiers in Virtual Reality, a premiere international peer-reviewed open access journal.
This paper “presents a viewpoint on immersive informal learning applications built as digital twins of the natural world”, according to Harrington’s abstract. “Such applications provide multimodal, interactive, immersive, embodied, and sensory experiences unique and different from typical game art environments because they are geospatial visualizations of data and information derived from ecological field plot studies, geographical information systems, drone images, and botanically correct 3D plant models visualized in real-time interactive game engines.”
Harrington is currently an associate professor of digital media in the Games and Interactive Media Program with the Nicholson School of Communication and Media at the University of Central Florida (UCF). She also has a secondary joint appointment in the UCF Learning Sciences Cluster.
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