ARCHITECTURE

Virtual Harmony’s architecture supports community effort among educators to bridge physical and virtual spaces and places in support of lifelong learning and development. The architecture relies upon hybrid-cloud components, involving virtual machines designed to support AI models (e.g., including GPT 4o Omni) and integrative data services, to offer compelling life-like interactive environments and realistic simulations. Virtual spaces are designed to maximize capabilities offered by 64-bit VR viewers employing Physically Based Rendering (PBR). In essence, “physically based” means the virtual environment has been designed to follow the same physical laws of light and materials as perceived in real life. This method helps create computer generated environments that look like they are from the real world because it imitates how light interacts with different surfaces.

Our software development effort involves collaborative effort among innovation pioneers in academia from across cognitive, engineering, data and computer sciences, community users, creative storytellers, imaginative designers, interactive 3D modelers, and awesome software coders with skills to employ AI/ML, data analytics, and user interfaces across a variety of platforms and devices.

Our collaborative model for software development, employing the above architecture, involves iterative coding and AI-prompt engineering, to employ emergent capabilities across software languages, platforms, data analytics, digital twins, and input from a range of domain experts and users in higher education. We have been employing a collaborative software development model for over 30 years starting with our initial trans-institutional laboratories involving several universities, faculty, and students representing a variety of academic disciplines.