Goals and Objectives

We believe that virtual reality has great potential to improve undergraduate chemical engineering situations. However before we can make full use of that potential, we must first determine what the strengths and weaknesses of virtual reality are in a technical setting, what situations will most benefit from virtual reality, and how to most effectively apply virtual reality to educational, scientific, and technical applications. In order to answer some of these questions, we have commenced development of a number of virtual reality based educational applications, with three major goals:

1. To develop practical, useful, educational tools, which will provide significant benefit to as many students nationwide as possible. These applications are being developed to run on student accessible equipment (Pentium PCs), and will be distributed through the CACHE Corporation at a minimal end-user cost.
   
   
2. To determine the situations that offer the greatest potential to benefit from virtual reality. Many small proof-of-concept applications have been developed to explore different possibilities.
   
   
3. To develop a knowledge base of techniques for the effective application of virtual reality to educational and technical applications. Eventually, it is planned to apply these techniques to practical engineering aplications.