Searching for "virtual reality"
VR, AR, and the Internet of Things: Life Beyond Second Life
https://campustechnology.com/Articles/2016/12/06/Life-Beyond-Second-Life-VR-AR-IoT.aspx
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.
Well, technically not the first for 2016, but certainly beautiful:
Best experience with VR goggles: Google Cardbox, HTC Vive etc. (please ask for more info if needed). If you have goggles, choose “VR Mode” (1), if viewing on your computing device (desktop, laptop, smart phone, tablet) and/or don’t have goggles, choose “Panorama Mode” (2)
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If you would like to brainstorm ideas to apply Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and/or 360 video in your courses, please let us know…
Metabook line
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-tech/marketplace-tech-thursday-november-17-2016
Film isn’t the only medium that gets the virtual reality treatment. The best-selling author Wally Lamb has a new book called “I’ll Take You There” that’ll launch as part of the Metabook line — a series of works that include extras like 360 degree videos and photos.
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More on ebooks in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=ebook
Code4Lib Proposed Preconference Workshops
http://2017.code4lib.org/workshops/proposed-workshops.html
Introduction to functional programming principles, including immutability, higher-order functions, and recursion using the Clojure programming language. This workshop will cover getting started with the Clojure REPL, building programs through function composition, testing, and web-development using ClojureScript.
Proposed by: Sam Popowich
This workshop will do a deep dive into approaches and recommend best practices for customizing Blacklight applications. We will discuss a range of topics, including styling and theming, customizing discovery experiences, and working with Solr.
Proposed by: Chris Beer, Jessie Keck, and Jack Reed
We all encounter failure in our professional lives: failed projects, failed systems, failed organizations. We often think of failure as a negative, but it has intrinsic value — and since it’s inevitable that we’ll eventually experience failure ourselves, it’s important to know how to accept it, how to take lessons from it, and how to grow from it professionally. Fail4Lib, now in its 5th year, is the perennial Code4Lib preconference dedicated to discussing and coming to terms with the failures that we all face in our professional lives. It is a safe space for us to explore failure, to talk about our own experiences with failure, and to encourage enlightened risk taking. The goal of Fail4Lib is for participants to be adept at failing gracefully, so that when we do fail, we do so in a way that moves us forward. This half-day preconference will consist of case studies, round-table discussions, and, for those interested in sharing, lightning talks on failures we’ve dealt with in our own work.
Proposed by: Andreas Orphanides and Bret Davidson
Intro to programming in Ruby on Rails
Proposed by: Carolyn Cole and Laney McGlohon
Amazon Web Services currently offers 58 services ranging from the familiar compute and storage systems to game development and the internet of things. We will focus on the 20-some services that you should be aware of as you move your applications to their cloud.
The morning session will be mostly overview and the afternoon session will be more practical examples and discussion. This could be broken into two sessions.
Proposed by: Cary Gordon, t/b/d, and t/b/d
FOLIO is a library services platform — infrastructure that allows cooperating library apps to share data. This workshop is a hands-on introduction to FOLIO for developers of library apps. In this tutorial you will work with your own Vagrant image through a series of exercises designed to demonstrate how to install an app on the platform and use the data sources and design elements the platform provides.
REQUIREMENTS Laptop (4GB) with Vagrant installed.
Proposed by: Peter Murray
Have an idea for an app? Want to work with FOLIO developers and others in the community on the FOLIO platform to make it happen. Come to this half-day hack-a-thon! Ideas for new developers will be posted in the project Jira, or bring your own concepts and work with others to make them reality.
REQUIREMENTS Laptop (4GB) with Vagrant installed. Attending the FOLIO Tutorial is recommended, but not required.
Proposed by: Peter Murray
Google Apps script is a server-side implementation of JavaScript which supports API calls to Google Services. This can provide an excellent platform for developing simple library applications. The libraries at Georgetown University and the University of Dayton have successfully deployed applications built with Google App Script.
In this workshop, we will step through the various types of applications that can be built with Google Apps Script.
(1) Custom cell formulas
(2) Spreadsheet Add On Functions (menu items, time based triggers)
(3) Google Apps Script as a Web Service
(4) Google Apps Script Add-Ons that can be shared globally or by domain
In this workshop, we will build sample instances of each of these types of applications (wifi-permitting) and spend some time brainstorming additional applications that would be useful for the library community.
Sample Applications: http://georgetown-university-libraries.github.io/#google-sheets
Proposed by: Terry Brady and Craig Boman
Calls to mindfulness and self care can have mixed reception in our field. While some view this important work as navel-gazing or unnecessary, it is integral to being present and avoiding burnout. Often this skewed attention to output comes at the expense of our personal lives, our organizations, our health, our relationships, and our mental well-being. Learning to prioritize self-care is an ongoing project among those who perform emotional labor. While some view the work of mindfulness as self-indulgent, it has proven to keep many on the track of being present and avoiding burnout.*
The purpose of this preconference is to provide a short introduction to self care and mindfulness with practical work we can use regardless of setting. We’ll discuss microaggressions and allyship (microaggressions being the brief and commonplace verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities that marginalized people of various groups experience daily and allyship referring to the powerful role that individuals from privileged groups can play in supporting marginalized individuals). We will then transition to a modified unconference setting where participants can practice scenarios and learn practical solutions. Each of the presenters has different set of skills and experiences that allow for many techniques and strategies to be explored. Preconference attendees will participate in sessions like “Mentor Speed Dating” where they get to talk to and question potential mentors/mentees. They may be coached through a guided meditation or walked through a calming breathing exercise. For those looking to a more physical space, office yoga and stretching techniques may be shared depending on the outcomes of the unconference interest.
Foundational materials and articles will be shared with the registrants prior to the meeting with the option of further discussion at the workshop. An open access guide to all the resources and readings will be available after the preconference, and people will be encouraged to share additional their tools on a website.
Suggested Hashtag #c4lselfcare
* Abenavoli, R.M., Jennings, P.A., Greenberg, M.T., Harris, A.R., & Katz, D.A. (2013). The protective effects of mindfulness against burnout among educators. Psychology of Education Review, 37(2), 57-69
Proposed by: Carmen Mitchell, Lia Friedman, and Torie Quinonez
In this preconference, participants will be introduced to Virtual Reality uses in library settings, notably, by way of the VR Reading Room. Within the VR Reading Room prototype, users can collaboratively explore digital collections (e.g. HathiTrust) by way of VR headsets. Participants of this workshop will have the opportunity to experience HTC Vive functionality. The system will be setup with a prototype e-book experiment in order to model several VR affordances. Once attendees have been introduced to the HTC Vive hardware and sample project, groups of participants will have an opportunity to further brainstorm novel uses cases.
Proposed by: Jim Hahn
Python[1] has become one of the dominant languages in scientific computing and is used by researchers around the world. Its popularity is due in large part to a rich set of libraries for data analysis like Pandas[2] and NumPy[3] and tools for exploring scientific code like Jupyter notebooks[4]. Join us for this half-day workshop on the basics of using Pandas within a Jupyter notebook. We will cover importing data, selecting and subsetting data, grouping data, and generating simple visualizations. All are welcome, but some familiarity with Python is recommended, e.g. the concepts covered in the Codecademy[5] or Google[6] Python courses.
[1] https://www.python.org/
[2] http://pandas.pydata.org/
[3] http://www.numpy.org/
[4] http://jupyter.org/
[5] https://www.codecademy.com/learn/python
[6] https://developers.google.com/edu/python/
Proposed by: Bret Davidson and Kevin Beswick
Learn about the features and capabilities of Sufia, a Hydra-based repository solution. Attendees will participate in a hand-on demonstration where they deposit content, edit metadata, create collections, and explore access control options. Attendees should bring laptops with Chrome, Firefox, or Safari installed. Please plan on bringing at least one image, document, or other digital content that you’re comfortable uploading and using for demo and experimentation purposes 🙂
Proposed by: Mark Bussey and Justin Coyne
The web can be a trove of openly accessible data, but it is not always readily available in a format that allows it to be downloaded for analysis and reuse. This workshop aims to introduce attendees to web scraping, a technique to automate extracting data from websites.
Part one of the workshop will use browser extensions and web tools to get started with web scraping quickly, give examples where this technique can be useful, and introduce how to use XPath queries to select elements on a page.
Part two will introduce how to write a spider in Python to follow hyperlinks and scrape several web pages using the Scrapy framework. We will conclude with an overview of the legal aspects of web scraping and an open discussion.
You don’t need to be a coder to enjoy this workshop! Anyone wishing to learn web scraping is welcome, although some familiarity with HTML will be helpful. Part two will require some experience with Python, attendees unfamiliar with this language are welcome to stay only for part one and still learn useful web scraping skills!
Proposed by: Thomas Guignard and Kim Pham
Paper prototyping is a low-cost, structured brainstorming technique that uses materials such as paper and pencils to better understand the way users interact with physical, visual, and textual information. It can help us learn how to better think through workflows, space design, and information architecture. Session attendees will learn about the ways low-fidelity prototyping and wireframing can be used to develop ideas, troubleshoot workflows, and improve learning and interaction.
In the first half of the workshop, participants will step through activities in icon design, persona development, and task development. In the second half they will develop a low fidelity prototype and step through a guerilla usability testing process with it.
Proposed by: Ekatarina (Eka) Grguric and Andreas Orphanides
Ed Dept. Launches $680,000 Augmented and Virtual Reality Challenge
By David Nagel 11/02/16
https://thejournal.com/articles/2016/11/02/ed-dept.-launches-680000-augmented-and-virtual-reality-challenge.aspx
EdSim Challenge, the competition is aimed squarely at developing students’ career and technical skills — it’s funded through the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006 — and calls on developers and ed tech organizations to develop concepts for “computer-generated virtual and augmented reality educational experiences that combine existing and future technologies with skill-building content and assessment. Collaboration is encouraged among the developer community to make aspects of simulations available through open source licenses and low-cost shareable components. ED is most interested in simulations that pair the engagement of commercial games with educational content that transfers academic, technical, and employability skills.”
all five finalists prizes of $50,000 to help them further develop their concepts. Finalists will also receive access to expert mentors to help with the process, along with gear and development tools, including Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, Galaxy Tab S2 9.7″, Gear S3 watch and Gear VR headset, as well as an Oculus Mobile software developer kit. ED noted that other prizes may also be added later.
The submission deadline will be Jan. 17,
Participants must also register on the Luminary Lightbox platform. (Registration is free.)
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more on VR in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=virtual+reality
Digitorium 2017
The conference welcomes proposals for papers and interactive presentations about research or teaching approaches using digital methods. For the first time in 2017, Digitorium also seeks to provide training opportunities for scholars of all levels keen to learn new digital techniques to advance their work, whether by learning a new digital mapping tool, discovering simple ways of visualizing research findings, using computers to conduct large-scale qualitative research, or experimenting with big data approaches at your desktop. There will be a stream of hands-on workshops running throughout the conference enabling participants both to share their own work, and also to expand their portfolio.
Digitorium 2017 will take place from Thursday 2nd to Saturday 4th March, and again, our primary focus is on digital methods, as this has provided fertile ground for interdisciplinary conversations to grow. There will be “tracks” through the conference based on: methods; early modern studies; American studies; and digital pedagogy. We welcome presentations on any topics engaging digital methods for scholarly purposes, whether for research, teaching, or community projects.
In 2017, the conference is expanding once more to offer not only multiple plenary sessions, panels, papers, and roundtables, but also a concerted series of workshops offering training for delegates in a variety of Digital Humanities techniques for research and teaching, from mapping to text encoding, digital data analysis, and more, to support enhanced professional development opportunities at the conference for faculty, staff, and graduate students.
This year, we are proud to present two plenary sessions and our first-ever plenary hackathon! Professor Scott Gwara (Univ. of South Carolina) will be presenting on MS-Link, a database that he created reunifying scattered manuscripts into full digital codices. Additionally, joint principal investigators of the Isabella D’Este Archive (IDEA) Project, Professor Anne MacNeil (Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and Professor Deanna Shemek (Univ. of California Santa Cruz) will be presenting their work on a digital archive uniting music, letters, and ceramics, and will lead our first live hackathon, engaging participants in the new virtual reality component of their project.
There will once again be a discounted “group rate” for registration to enable participants to bring their team with them, as collaboration is such a hallmark in digital scholarship, and it would be great to be able to hear about projects from multiple different perspectives from the people working together on them. There are also discounted rates available for graduate student presenters, and UA faculty. I do not mean to impose, but if this is an event which would be of interest to colleagues and collaborators, I would be enormously grateful if you might be able to circulate our CFP or a link to our website with them, we really want to let as many people as possible know about the conference to ensure it will be a real success.
Here is a link to the website which includes the full-length CFP:
https://apps.lib.ua.edu/blogs/digitorium/
Methods provide the focus for our conference, both in a pragmatic sense in terms of the use of different techniques to achieve particular DH projects, but also the ways in which sharing digital methods can create new links between disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The idea powering Digitorium is to build on the community which has emerged in the course of the previous two years’ events in order to create a space for conversations to take place between scholars, graduate students, and practitioners from many different disciplines about their shared methods and techniques which unite them in their digital work.
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more on digital humanities in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=digital+humanities
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more on virtual reality in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=virtual+reality
Stanford VR Project Shows Students Oceans of the Future
By Dian Schaffhauser 10/19/16
https://thejournal.com/articles/2016/10/19/stanford-vr-project-shows-students-oceans-of-the-future.aspx
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.
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more on virtual reality in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=virtual+reality
5 ways virtual reality is being used in education right now
By Meris Stansbury
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.
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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.
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more on VR in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=virtual+reality
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3D User Interfaces for Virtual Reality
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more on VR in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=virtual+reality
