Interactive Training Through Knowledge Navigation (a Preliminary Project Report)

This paper describes the initiation of our project to study three-dimensional navigation through manufacturing knowledge domains suitable for training. In summary we are organizing and representing knowledge from the NIST Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory (MEL) and associating that knowledge with virtual objects within a virtual, three-dimensional environment. We are using the MEL Shop as a metaphor to represent the top-level spatial structure that houses the virtual objects. The Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) standard plays a key role in our initial work. However, the role of interoperability standards, in general, will be significant in this project, both for implementing the navigational platform and for populating it with manufacturing domain content. The main goal of this paper is to describe the information we have studied, our thought process in defining the project, and the preliminary prototype we have developed to show our initial ideas.