MRI: Acquisition of a Virtual Reality System for Expert Decision Making and Immersive Learning

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This Instrument of an immersive virtual reality (VR) system with synchronized motion tracking system will provide a much-needed technology capability for research and education that is not readily accessible to academia and industry in the state of Missouri and the surrounding geographical region. The VR system will support research and educational activities of a large number of University of Missouri (MU) faculty members and their external collaborators in diverse science and engineering fields such as transportation, imaging, civil structure architectures, information technology, bioinformatics as well as education. The VR system is planned to be integrated into multiple courses at MU as well as other schools in Missouri. Further, this infrastructure will support NSF REU sites, as well as other training programs already active at MU, while broadening participation of underrepresented and underserved groups at the regional level. Outreach activities in the project will help disseminate best practices, technologies, tools, policies, and service models to streamline the engineering/operations of the VR system for a new generation of applications. This will be valuable for other campuses and research labs across the world. Last, the planned VR system engagement with first responders in public safety demonstrations will provide an opportunity to explore translation of the project outcomes to the community.This immersive virtual reality (VR) system with a synchronized motion tracking system will enable foundational and applied research studies across multiple disciplines to gain a better understanding of decision making under complex situations involving human-machine interactions and learning in three-dimensional virtual reality datasets. The research activities envisioned will span a broad set of areas such as: computer graphics, computer vision, machine learning, transportation systems, built environment prototyping, public safety during disaster response, computational biology and bioinformatics. The project outcomes will create new knowledge pertaining to immersive application development, training, and personalized learning to benefit end-user groups such as police, fire fighters, civil engineers, public works personnel, transportation engineers, and educators.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.