EEC-9700753 Harmon ABSTRACT The award provides funding to the University of California-Los Angeles, under the direction of Dr. Thomas Harmon, for the support of a Combined Research-Curriculum Development project entitled, "Virtual Reality in the Environmental Engineering Curriculum." This project's goals are to incorporate recent developments in environmental restoration research to the civil and environmental engineering curriculum; to do so using recent breakthroughs in virtual reality programming language (VRML) and to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach as a teaching tool and its potential to infuse the engineering curriculum with currently developing techniques. This project will link the recent research results in Civil and Environmental Engineering with those of an investigator in the field of visualization and virtual simulations in UCLA's School of Architecture and Urban Design. The tangible product of the proposed research will be an interactive site investigation software (ISIS) package. The design project for the course will be based on a virtual reality/real time simulator of a hazardous waste site. The students will visualize the site at the computer terminal, and travel throughout the site using a mouse-controlled cursor.
