An IEC-based Virtual Environment Authoring System for High School Education

We show software tools to intuitively create a virtual environment (VE) system based on a soft computing technique. The proposed tools use Interactive Evolutionary Computation (IEC) to easily perform 3D authoring tasks such as creating aesthetically pleasing 3D computer graphics (3DCG) models, adding realistic touch sensations to the models, and configuring an effective VE system. Because the tools require no special knowledge and programming skills of users except for sensitivity, we apply the tools to high school IT education. The high school students can make virtual contents by rating the candidate 3DCG models generated and displayed by the system. Then the system evolves the models based on the rates. In this paper, we describe two IEC-based tools for designing the 3DCG model and adding the touch sensation. An ongoing experiment letting the high school students to make a collaborative VE by using the proposed tools is also mentioned.