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This paper describes the use of multimedia annotations in virtual environments for training and education. Multimedia annotations may include: a drawing or whiteboarding capability, enabling participants to overlay graphics on the 2D or 3D world; the use of chat, audio, or video teleconferencing; and the overlay of analytic or symbolic information in the world.
There are three potential benefits. 1) Annotations may enhance feedback from trainers or teachers to participants. In a military context, the trainer can draw the trainees' actual route traveled in a 3D world, and compare that to the desired route and to the enemies' path, pointing out when the enemy was able to see the trainees. 2) By saving and replaying data from both the original virtual environments as well as the annotations, other people - either students or analysts - can benefit from the original experience, e.g., analysts of military training exercises in 3D simulations can listen to the soldiers' rationale for particular actions that seem incomprehensible during subsequent replay. 3) The methods for creating annotations support multiple forms of interaction between participants in a distributed virtual environment, and therefore may enable students and teachers to be at different physical locations, thus supporting distance learning.
Reference: Marcy Stahl and Julia Loughran, "Analytical Augmentation of 3D Simulation Environments", in Visual Data Exploration and Analysis V, Robert F. Erbacher, Alex Pang, Editors, Proceedings of SPIE Vol. 3298, pp. 38-43 (1998)
