From: grrivera@campus.mty.itesm.mx (Gregorio Rivera) Subject: EDUC: VR Center in Mexico Date: Thu, 9 May 1996 09:03:40 -0700 Virtual Environments for Learning in Mexico Gregorio Rivera Advanced Lab for Learning - 1996 Center for Knowledge Systems/ITESM/Campus Monterrey At the crest of the global educational VR wave, is ITESM's Advanced Lab for Learning (Laboratorio Avanzado de Aprendizaje) in Monterrey, Mexico, land of 100+ degree climate and Mexico's most industrialized and high-tech region. Its host, the Center for Knowledge Systems (Centro de Sistemas de Conocimiento) takes as "its mission to study and develop systems which enable individuals and organizations to sustain productive relationships within the emerging knowledge economy." states Dr. Javier Carrillo, the Center's Director, "This includes management of organizational learning, intellectual capital and value-based management studies to create virtual organizations." The purpose of the Advanced Lab for Learning is demonstrating sponsored R&D "action projects" to capitalize on the potential of digital technologies for individual and organizational learning. This really leaves us open to be exploratory in learning applications in a variety of industries. Our world-class staff working as a virtual organization with global consultants, is multi-lingual and multi-cultural. The depth and breadth of the collective experience is impressive! We do global-networking efforts for learning for many knids of people and organizations! As the Coordinator of the Center's Advanced Lab for Learning I complement the mix. We have secured and continue to seek out multi-national corporations conscious of new media systems in research design and interest long range planning for our mutual efforts. This includes visionary VR firms and international labs with whom we work. The Center has established on-going sponsorship for our work from Motorola University, Bancomer, Banorte, EDS, PEMEX, and TRO. The Lab is establishing new sponsorship, collaborations, and projects with IBM and IBM/Mexico, SGI/Mexico, Centro Cultural Infantil/Museo Virtual de Ni=F1os, UNICEF/Mexico, European Open University Network, Monterrey 400 Committee, Telepresence Research, Televisa S.A., DMA, Cerveceria Cuauhtemoc Moctezuma S.A., Dominio Digital S.A., Centro Nacional de los Artes, Consejo Nacional de los Artes, MaK Technologies, UCF Institute of Simulation and Training, Kinetic Design Group at Carnegie Mellon University, MIT Media Lab, and Mexico AutoDesk Training Center, among other groups. Our alliance with the Centro Nacional de los Artes allows us to share a SGI Onyx RealityEngine2, FakeSpace 3C Boom, 2 Virtual Research HMDs, Ascension Flock of Birds, Cyberware scanner, plus MultiGen, Paradigm, Wavefront, and Division's Virtual Design Environment. In this virtual co-lab we are collaborating as media technologists and artists/designers to initiate bold projects to represent Mexico's leapfrogging into the new millennium. A new grant from the IBM SUR Program puts us into a different league with a SP2 supercomputer and a choice library of visualization and advanced multimedia software. We are foremost in advocating an ATM network on campus as well as a ATM connection to the closest supercomputer node in Texas. In 1983 I introduced fellow MIT student Scott Fisher, former Director VIEW (Virtual Environment Workstation) Lab at NASA and optics engineer, Eric Howlett at LEEP Systems. Under contract to NASA since 1985, LEEP did parallel development on the first commercially available telepresence and VR system in 1989. During this time NASA started experimenting with computer-generated and headtracked HMDs. Eric's wide-angle lenses provided the correctly formatted and aligned immersive display for real-time and computer-generated tests of SkyLab's telepresence robotics construction. I was at LEEP for 11 years assisting in the development of the original immersive stereo camera/viewer, the projects with NASA, and evolution of the stereo video (telepresence) and stereo computer-based imagery(Headtracking) Cyberface series of HMDs and head-guided booms. My final team project was last year with NASA's Phase II contract for a remote control head-guided boom-mounted telepresence system for a helicopter drone. The only break I took from LEEP was to be Design Coordinator for Environmental Graphics with DEC's Corporate Communications Group. Later I initiated a VR world of Tenochtitlan with the Boston Computer Society VR Group which we presented at SIGGRAPH '93. The SIGGRAPH '94 Visual Proceedings published Proyecto Xochicalco, a multi-participant distributed educational and entertaining ancient Aztec/Mayan ball court game. As a new media artist, media technologist and educator I found my place in Mexico being part of its nation-building process. As a graduate student at MIT's pre-Media Lab graduate program from 1980-1983, I was writing essays on Mexico's satellite development, Industrias Alfa (Mexico's largest corporation) corporate communications with new media, and videotex shared educational and medical services in southern Texas and northern Mexico. I was ready to be here! With David Traub's (Media Director,Lawnmower Man) introduction in 1993, the enthusiastic response by students and professors to a VR I presented at the XVIII Simposium Internacional de Sistemas Computacionales in Monterrey paved the way to the creation of the Advanced Lab for Learning. I was invited in 1994 by ITESM President Dr. Rafael Rangel Sostman and Dr. Javier Carrillo, the Director of the Center for Knowledge Systems, to create a virtual environments lab for learning. In their quiet hum, the SGI Impact, SunSparc station, and PC/Macs are cooled in the sanctum of a post-modern hallmark building mirroring the twin rocky peaks of Cerro de la Silla, Monterrey's dominant mountain. The Lab's plush spotlit surroundings are accompanied by burst of frenzy activities and proposal development efforts into international R & D "action projects" in educational VR, network learning,including organizational and knowledge visualization. Also as Coordinator of the Club of Budapest's (Club of Rome's associate organization) Regional Center for Planetary Consciousness in Mexico all our work is human and eco-friendly! This philosophy will show up in the WWWeb Magazine we are constructing for the Club of Budapest, an artistic, literary, and spiritual group, ... for example, to include charter members Dali Lama's latest meditations, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez latest short story! The closes we come to the military is collaborating with MaK Technologiesk, senior consultants to the SIMNET. Our distributed educational gaming project is testing their software on our networked fiber optics with another SGI bank a thousand kilometers away in Mexico City. The Center for Knowledge Systems is a think tank and gateway for Latin America. The world's industrial countries' and trans-national corporations' mutual entry to a clear understanding of what media and virtual community networks do to effect the work flow of individual and organizational needs in school, factories, offices and corporate networks. In essence, "the design of virtual cultures," says Dr. Alex Laszlo, Coordinator of Research at the Center. Our move now is to assist organizations in designing their virtual networks for collaboration. From the Center's distinct vantage point, we are able to view the needs and potential for linkages between organizations with limited technological vision or resources. We do this by visualizing the structure of their knowledge economy and charting its direction to become learning organizations. We seek insight into deeper learning and organizational structures with virtual environments. In this way, the Advanced Lab for Learning seeks ways to examine transparent and non-intrusive interfaces for intuitive, hyper-relational and multi-sensorial navigational learning environments on disk, on-line, and CD-ROM, either screen-based or immersive environments. Our efforts focus on demonstrating principles of the emerging knowledge economy. The goal is for participants to gain insight into process and conclusive design in exchange, cooperation, coordination, and integration of knowledge inquiry. We plan to do this successfully! To the beginning of learning there is no end. "Al principio de aprendizaje no hay fin." Prof. Gregorio Rivera Coordinator - Advanced Lab for Learning +(8) 328-4049 Direct Center for Knowledge Systems +(8) 359-1538 Fax ITESM/Campus Monterrey +(8) 358-2000 x5202 E. Garza Sada 2501 Sur Monterrey, N.L 64849 MEXICO ITESM Web Home Page:http://www.mty.itesm.mx