"Virtual Creatures" Teach Biology Without Dissection.

STANFORD, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 9, 1998--Remember dissection in high school biology class -- the smell, the mess, the struggle to find an obscure muscle or artery? But what if dissecting a frog went something like this:

You need no scalpels, probes or formaldehyde. Without touching the frog, you can rotate it to view it from any angle and study its external anatomy. On command, the skin turns transparent. You can zoom through it to view the muscles, or peel the muscles back to expose the internal organs and skeleton.

This frog, a three-dimensional computer model, does exist. It is part of the Virtual Creatures project, a Stanford-based program exploring ways to use computers and interactive software to teach vertebrate biology.

Aimed at middle school and high school students, Virtual Creatures is the brainchild of a group called SUMMIT (Stanford University Medical Media and Information Technologies Group). SUMMIT was founded eight years ago to create computer-based teaching tools for the Stanford University School of Medicine and has expanded to provide educational multimedia for medical students and doctors.

Virtual Creatures is SUMMIT's first project for secondary schools. A $500,000 seed grant from the National Science Foundation got the project started.

"We are visual creatures," said Ramani Pichumani, a research investigator for the project. "The goal of the project is to take advantage of our visual nature. We learn better when we are visually engaged."

To do that, the Virtual Creatures team created a virtual environment, a three-dimensional, computer-generated setting for students to wander through and explore.

"The next big leaps in education will come in virtual environments," said Parvati Dev, SUMMIT's director and principal investigator for Virtual Creatures.

Island hopping

While computer games like "Myst" and "Doom" generate simple virtual environments, the Virtual Creatures team exploited more powerful technology to create a richer environment -- called Frog Island -- with numerous opportunities for interactive learning.

After being greeted by a ranger who explains how to get around the island, students can visit, in any order, a series of huts, each focusing on a different aspect of frog biology: muscles, organ systems, bones, nerves, habitat and so on.

"With a virtual reality model, you don't have to worry about real-life constraints," said Pichumani.

For instance, in contrast to a real frog, the virtual frog can be taken apart in any sequence -- say, starting with the digestive system -- and then put back together again.

Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in Berkeley, Calif., gathered the data for the three-dimensional model of the frog by slicing a frozen real frog into very thin slices and digitizing images of the slices.

Besides viewing and manipulating the three-dimensional frog, students can call up photos of frogs in their natural habitats and consult virtual texts for thorough explanations.

Inviting vs. isolating

Users don't have to don visors, helmets and gloves -- the gear usually associated with virtual reality -- to set foot on Frog Island. The SUMMIT team eschewed that kind of "immersive" technology in favor of images that could be shown on a standard computer screen. They wanted Virtual Creatures to be low-cost, accessible and inviting rather than disruptive or isolating, Pichumani said.

Local public school teachers helped design the program to ensure that it met the educational needs of students. They also helped ready the project for classroom use by developing lesson plans and student activities.

Osiris Studios, a software company in Santa Cruz, Calif., has licensed the program and plans to start distributing it to schools in time for the start of classes this fall, Pichumani said.

Virtual Creatures is still under construction, Pichumani added, and SUMMIT continues to expand its capabilities. The team is now working on involving another sense -- touch -- in the students' activities and on making the frog "living" so that students can watch circulation, respiration, limb movement and other body functions in action.

SUMMIT plans ultimately to build a menagerie of similar creatures so that students can study a range of vertebrates.

Virtual Creatures requires lots of processing power and runs best on high- end graphics workstations, Pichumani said. But the speed of innovation in the computer industry should soon make the necessary technology affordable for many schools, he said. The team is also looking at ways to transfer most of the processing work to a central computer, which students and teachers could access by logging on from a cheaper computer.

Pichumani will demonstrate the Virtual Creatures program Thursday, July 9, at the "Virtual Reality in Education and Training" conference (VRET '98) in London, England. The conference, held July 7 through 9 at City University, features speakers and presenters from universities, companies and research institutes in the United States and Europe.

Visit the Virtual Creatures at http://summit.stanford.edu/creatures on the Web.

    CONTACT:  Stanford University Medical Center
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               Walter Hangad, 650/723-7897 or 650/723-6911
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               M.A. Malone, 650/723-6912
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               Ramani Pichumani, 650/723-9683
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               Parvati Dev, 650/723-8087
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