But it gets even more interesting when virtual and augmented reality meet the Internet of Things
when Second Life began, there was a lot of interest, but the toolset was limited — just because of the timeframe, not that the toolset wasn’t a good one for that period. But, things matured. I think it was, in particular, the ability to work in HD that improved things a lot. Then came the ability to bring in datasets — creating dashboards and ways for people to access other data that they could bring into the virtual reality experiment. I think those two things were real forces for change.
A dashboard could pop up, and you could select among several tools, and you could get a feed from somewhere on the Internet — maybe a video or a presentation. And you can use these things as you move through this hyper reality: The datasets you select can be manipulated and be part of the entire experience.
So, the hyper reality experience became deeper, richer with tools and data via the IoT; and with HD it became more real.
We can’t deny the fact that curriculum and the way we teach is becoming unbundled. Some things are going to happen online and in the virtual space, and other things will happen in the classroom. And the expense of education is going to drive how we operate. Virtual reality tools, augmented reality tools, and visualization tools can offer experiences that can be mass-produced and sent out to lots of students, machine to machine, at a lower cost. Virtual field trips and other kinds of virtual learning experiences will become much more commonplace in the next 5 years.
To view the VR campus tour, visit the Vertra site.
“The app arose from a group project for an entrepreneurship class taught by professors Joshua Ehrig and James Peterson,” according to a report from The Brown and White,
A new, free virtual reality program allows users to explore just what happens as climate change kills off coral reefs. The Stanford Ocean Acidification Experience is a free science education tool that takes students to the bottom of the sea and then fast-forwards their experience to the end of this century, when, as scientists predict, many coral reefs are expected to corrode through ocean acidification. By putting the experience in VR, the collaborators say they are hoping to change people’s behavior in the real world.
The project came out of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, which created a related 360-degree video project that also examines the problem of global warming and its impact on the ocean’s life forms. But it’s the VR version that allows the viewer to deep-sea dive and collect samples off of the ocean floor.
The lab created the software in partnership with marine biologists Fiorenza Micheli from Stanford and Kristy Kroeker, formerly at Stanford and now at the University of California, Santa Cruz, as well as Roy Pea, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. The development process took two years to recreate a virtual replica of an actual rocky reef around the Italian island of Ischia
A related video, “The Crystal Reef,” filmed in 360 degrees and developed as part of a master’s degree project by a lab member, premiered during the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year. There, people could watch the film on VR headgear. “We had a line of dozens of people for 11 hours a day, six days straight,” said Bailenson, in a Stanford article about the project.
The VR project has also gone to Washington, where lawmakers and staffers tried it out during a Capitol Hill event organized by non-profit Ocean Conservancy.
1. For new research: using a state-of-the-art “haptic” floor of aeronautic metal that vibrates and moves to stimulate the physical world for research on how VR has the potential to change the way users feel and behave. There may also be implications for confronting racism, sexism, and aiding in empathy and humanitarian efforts, says Bailenson.
2. For coding and 3D design: According to Bob Nilsson, director of Vertical Solutions Marketing for Extreme Networking, the University of Maryland, College Park, now offers a class on virtual reality that gives students the opportunity to design their own interactive world, work with 3D audio and experiment with immersive technology through a combination of hands-on learning and case studies. Also, the University of Georgia is offering similar classes where students design and explore applications for VR. Conrad Tucker, an assistant professor of engineering at Pennsylvania State University, has received funding to build a virtual engineering lab where students hold, rotate, and fit together virtual parts as they would with their real hands.
3. For anatomy and dissection: Said one Extreme Networks survey respondent, “Our students have been developing a VR model of a cow’s anatomy for dissection and study. You have the ability to drill down to the circulatory system, brain, muscle, skeleton, etc. Our applied tech program is using VR in conjunction with Autocad for models of projects they design.”
4. For engagement: A whopping 68 percent of survey respondents said the major benefit of using VR in education is to excite students about the subject matter. 39 percent said it’s great for encouraging creativity.
5. For field trips: Google has eliminated restrictions on Expeditions, their VR field trips program. Google Expeditions was cited in the survey as one of the most popular sources of VR content, but with the complaint that it was a restricted program.
Virtual reality may have its place, but until traditional education moves away from their 20th century teaching methodology and replaces it with educationally innovative, 21st century learning methodology, within a blended and flipped learning environment, virtual reality is currently, much ado about nothing.
Unless any new application is educationally innovative and directly and measurably contributes to effective, efficient, consistent, affordable, relevant advanced student success outcomes for ALL students, future innovations must wait for current innovations to be implemented.
This process of appriate choice and appropriate implemention must start at the top and be beta tested for measured student success before its rolled out system wide.
Sign in here: https://www.google.com/edu/expeditions/. A minimum of 6 interested teachers. In order to take as many students as possible on an Expedition, we’ll visit schools showing the most interest first.
Here is a taste of what lies ahead:
When viewing on a mobile phone, the user can change the point of view of the video fluidly in 360 degrees simply by moving the device around.
The study took place with about 100 middle school students taking a brief “virtual field trip” to learn about climate science. Some students experienced the field trip while wearing a VR headset, while others watched the same material in standard video on a computer screen.
“higher ratings of presence, interest, and enjoyment,”
The paper noted an obvious logistical benefit to virtual field trips over getting on a bus for an in-person outing. “Virtual field trips make it possible to experience things that are too expensive, dangerous, or impossible in the real world,” it says. The experiment did not address the difference in educational value between a real-world field trip and a virtual one.
for programs like nursing, pharmacy and medicine, VR seems promising for teaching some skills, as a piece of a broader curriculum that includes in-person hands-on learning as well.
Zoom, Teams, Skype, and FaceTime all became daily fixtures, and many of us quickly became fatigued by seeing our colleagues, students and far-away loved ones almost exclusively in 2D. Most video conferencing solutions were not designed to be online classrooms. what is missing from the current video platforms that could improve online teaching: tools to better facilitate student interactions, including enhanced polling and quizzing features, group work tools, and more.
While universities continue to increase in-person and HyFlex courses, hoping to soon see campuses return to normalcy, there is mounting evidence that the increased interest in digital tools for teaching and learning will persist even after the pandemic.
We should move beyond 2D solutions and take advantage of what extended reality (XR) and virtual reality (VR) have to offer us.
Professor Courtney Cogburn created the 1,000 Cut Journey, an immersive VR research project that allows participants to embody an avatar that experiences various forms of racism. Professor Shantanu Lal has implemented VR headsets for pediatric dentistry patients who become anxious during procedures. At Columbia Engineering, professor Steven Feiner’s Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab explores the design and development of 2D and 3D user interfaces for a broad range of applications and devices. Professor Letty Moss-Salentijn is working with Feiner’s lab to create dental training simulations to guide dental students through the process of nerve block injection. Faculty, students and staff at Columbia’s Media Center for Art History have created hundreds of virtual reality panoramas of archaeology projects and fieldwork that are available on the Art Atlas platform.
In spring 2020, a group of Columbia students began to build “LionCraft,” a recreation of Columbia’s Morningside campus in Minecraft. Even though students were spread out around the world, they still found creative and fun ways to run into each other on campus, in an immersive online format.
5 higher-ed programs using XR to transform how college students learn
Colleges and universities are using virtual and augmented reality in courses that range from human anatomy to media as a way to make education more immersive and inclusive.
medical school students at Colorado State University’s Clapp Lab reach for virtual reality (VR) headsets, which dangle from the ceiling of the 2,500 square foot facility.
Makransky, G., & Lilleholt, L. (2018). A structural equation modeling investigation of the emotional value of immersive virtual reality in education. Educational Technology Research and Development, 66(5), 1141–1164. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-018-9581-2
an affective path in which immersion predicted presence and positive emotions, and a cognitive path in which immersion fostered a positive cognitive value of the task in line with the control value theory of achievement emotions.
business analyses and reports (e.g., Belini et al.2016; Greenlight and Roadtovr 2016), predict that virtual reality (VR) could be the biggest future computing platform of all time.
better understanding of the utility and impact of VR when it is applied in an educational context.
several different VR systems exist, including cave automatic virtual envi-ronment (CAVE), head mounted displays (HMD) and desktop VR. CAVE is a projection-based VR system with display-screen faces surrounding the user (Cruz-Neira et al.1992). As the user moves around within the bounds of the CAVE, the correct perspective and stereo projections of the VE are displayed on the screens. The user wears 3D glasses insidethe CAVE to see 3D structures created by the CAVE, thus allowing for a very lifelikeexperience. HMD usually consist of a pair of head mounted goggles with two LCD screens portraying the VE by obtaining the user ́s head orientation and position from a tracking system (Sousa Santos et al. 2008). HMD may present the same image to both eyes (monoscopic), or two separate images (stereoscopic) making depth perception possible. Like the CAVE, HMD offers a very realistic and lifelike experience by allowing the user to be completely surrounded by the VE. As opposed to CAVE and HMD, desktop VR does not allow the user to be surrounded by the VE. Instead desktop VR enables the user to interact with a VE displayed on a computer monitor using keyboard, mouse, joystick or touch screen (Lee and Wong 2014; Lee et al. 2010).
the use of simulations results in at least as good or better cognitive outcomes and attitudes toward learning than do more traditional teaching methods (Bayraktar2000; Rutten et al. 2012; Smetana and Bell2012; Vogel et al.2006). However, a recent report concludes that there are still many questions that need to be answered regarding the value of simulations in education (Natioan Research Council2011). In the past, virtual learning simulations were primarily accessed through desktop VR. With the increased use of immersive VR it is now possible to obtain a much higher level of immersion in the virtual world, which enhances many virtual experiences (Blascovich and Bailenson2011).
an understanding of how to harness the emotional appeal of e-learning tools is a central issue for learning and instruction, since research shows that initial situ-ational interest can be a first step in promoting learning several educational theories that describe the affective, emotional, and motivational factors that play a role in multimedia learning which are relevant for understanding the role of immersion in VR learning environments.
the cognitive-affective theory of learning with media (Moreno and Mayer2007),
and
the integrated cognitive affective model of learning with multimedia (ICALM; Plass and Kaplan2016)
Presence, intrinsic motivation, enjoyment, and control and active learning are the affective factors used in this study. defintions
The sample consisted of 104 students (39 females and 65 males; average age=23.8 years) from a large European university.
immersive VR (Samsung Gear VR with Samsung Galaxy S6) and the desktop VR version of a virtual laboratory simulation (on a standard computer). The participants were randomly assigned to two groups: the first used the immersive VR followed by the desktop VR version, and the second used the two platforms in the opposite sequence.
The VR learning simulation used in this experiment was developed by the company Labster and designed to facilitate learning within the field of biology at a university level. The VR simulation was based on a realistic murder case in which the participants were required to investigate a crime scene, collect blood samples and perform DNA analysis in a high-tech laboratory in order to identify and implicate the murderer
we conclude that the emotional value of the immersive VR version of the learning simulation is significantly greater than the desktop VR version. This is a major empirical contribution of this study.
