Terra Virtualis

Terra Virtualis is a solo developed open-source project published by Iowa State University with support from Grant Wood Art Colony and Drake Legal Clinic.

Terra Virtualis is my masters (MS HCI) project built to provide museums and libraries technology / methodology to address challenges present in immersive and remote education.

This project served as a way to give back to the artistic and historic communities that I have been involved with for so long. I did this by creating a research backed, open-source, free, virtual environment that empowers museums and libraries to effectively distribute knowledge.

The project was ambitious; both identifying educational methodologies that are highly adaptable to virtual environments and having rigorous scientific / educational backing; while creating a fully realized virtual environment that is flexible and adaptive to serve as a template for future art digitization projects.

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Problem: 

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• Artistic, cultural, and historic education is critically lacking not just in the US but around the world. 

• Artistic, cultural and historic institutions have been generally slow to adapt to technological and market changes.

• Little research has been done on implementation of existing educational methodologies in virtual space beyond basic traditional education methods. 

• There is a need to identifying educational methods that have been successfully used in higher-education and are readily adaptable to virtual environments.

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Solution:

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• Create a robust and adaptive system based on commonly used technologies that helps artistic, cultural, and historic institutions easily build impactful virtual experiences.

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Terra Virtualis completed in 2022 with the launch of a open-source learning environment built in Unreal Engine. The project is available both at the Iowa State Library and Github: