Virtual Field Trip via Digital Storytelling

Digital storytelling is a practice of combining digital content such as 3-dimensional
images, text, sound, images, and video to create a short story. It is the intersection
between the old art of storytelling and access to powerful technologies. This project will
be a step to experiment the development and effectiveness of digital storytelling and
hopefully ignite a source of motivation and encourages others to tap into their interests
and skills to develop their own digital storytelling and expand ICT usage in this
country. School children look forward to traditional field trips. However, such trips are
costly. VFT aims to reduce if not eliminate the constraints that traditional field trips
face such as money, time, energy, resources, distance and inaccessible area. To fit the
time frame, the VFT is created only for small selected areas in the KL Bird Park even
though the KL Bird Park is not that big because some of the areas are not suitable to
take panoramic pictures. The development of the VFT is adapted from QTVR Creation
Steps by Kitchens (2006). The procedure consists of defining the problem statements
and goals, literature review and research, creating image content through taking photos
at the site, transforming the photos to QTVR node through stitching, design and
construct prototype, inserting interactivity such as hotspots, delivering the output, and
last but not least, evaluation. The final output of the project is the KL Bird Park Virtual
Field Trip which consists of a photo based 3D panoramic images for each scene from
the site which are linked to one another and also hotspots which are placed on the
panoramic images to reveal the birds' information with one click on the hotspots. The
informal evaluation of the final output that was conducted shows an overwhelming
response and acceptance. All of the respondents would like to see more of this type of
VFT in the future.