Verizon and Dreamscape Learn will form a 5G innovation lab to develop immersive VR learning experiences for various education levels and environments. And as part of the partnership, Verizon Ventures has taken an equity stake in Dreamscape.
Tami Erwin, the CEO of Verizon Business, said in a statement that Dreamscape shows that innovation on top of 5G can lead to powerful and complex VR experiences and simulations using lower-cost, tetherless VR hardware. Before the pandemic, Dreamscape operated five VR entertainment centers in Los Angeles and elsewhere, and I went through a VR experience for How to Train Your Dragon.
Richard Arum is dean of the School of Education and professor of education and (by courtesy) sociology, criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine. He recently served as senior fellow at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation from 2013-2015; and director of the Education Research Program at the Social Science Research Council from 2006-2013, where he oversaw the development of the Research Alliance for New York City Schools, a research consortium designed to conduct ongoing evaluation of the New York City public schools.
To find more information about the Future Trends Forum, including notes and recordings of all previous sessions, click here: http://forum.futureofeducation.us/.
Apple’s upcoming mixed reality headset will reportedly weigh less than an iPhone
Ming-Chi Kuo says it will weigh less than 150 grams
A weight of 150 grams would make Apple’s headset lighter than the Oculus Quest 2 (503 grams), Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 (645 grams), and the Valve Index (809 grams). It would be lighter than Google’s Daydream View, a fabric VR headset designed to hold your phone, which weighed 220 grams. The headset could even be lighter than your iPhone, given that the standard iPhone 12 weighs 164 grams.
The headset, codenamed “N301,” may also have 8K displays, eye-tracking technology, and more than a dozen cameras to both track your hand movements and capture footage that can be displayed inside the headsetapp
Students with Apple/Mac can follow our ASVR activity though my Oculus goggles, which will stream live my view at my personal FB page: https://www.facebook.com/plamen.miltenoff
During class meeting
Who are the students: about 5 min to learn who they are
What are virtual worlds: about 15 min to explain their part in immersive technologies and what immersive technologies are
They’ve had huge success in China, but China is a pretty unique market. In late 2019, they expanded to Korea
the company is partnered with Deutsche Telekom and LG Uplus in Germany and Korea respectively, so it’s not too far a stretch to wager that the US branches of those carriers (T-Mobile and LG Electronics) will form at least part of their US distribution channels.
Finch Technologies makes body-tracking wearable devices to serve as controllers for XR applications and experiences including the recently announced FinchRing (this is the promised cherry on top).
The finger-worn hand tracker is designed to enable convenient and discreet 6-degree-of-freedom controls.
Tagesschau 2025 – an application based on a German news program that will present, among other features, holographic weather forecasts;
Apple’s working on solving this problem, too, according to a report in Nikkei Asia. The newspaper says that Apple is working with TSMC, its primary processor manufacturer, to develop a new kind of augmented reality display that’s printed directly on wafers, or the base layer for chips.
If Apple does eventually reveal a big leap forward in AR display technology — especially if the technology is developed and owned by Apple instead of a supplier — Apple could find itself with multi-year head-start in augmented reality as it did when the iPhone vaulted it to the head of the smartphone industry.
Apple is also adding hardware to its iPhones that hint at a headset-based future. High-end iPhones released in 2020 include advanced Lidar sensors embedded in their camera.
Microsoft has invested heavily in these kind of technologies, purchasing AltspaceVR, a social network for virtual reality, in 2018. Before it launched Hololens, it paid $150 million for intellectual property from a smartglasses pioneer.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks the most in public about his hopes for augmented reality. Last year, he said, “While I expect phones to still be our primary devices through most of this decade, at some point in the 2020s, we will get breakthrough augmented reality glasses that will redefine our relationship with technology.”
Cabada, E., Kurt, E., & Ward, D. (2021). Constructing a campus-wide infrastructure for virtual reality. College & Undergraduate Libraries, 0(0), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2021.1881680
As an interdisciplinary hub, academic libraries are uniquely positioned to serve the full lifecycle of immersive environment needs, from development through archiving of successful projects. As and informal learning environment that or discipline neutral and high traffic, the academic library can serve as a clearinghouse for experimentation and transmission of best practices across colleges.
these foundational questions:
1. What VR infrastructure needs do faculty and researchers have?
2. Where is campus support lagging?
3. What current partnerships exist?
4. What and where is the campus level of interest in VR?
As marketing for workshops and programs can be challenging, particularly for large institutions, data was collected on where workshop participants learned about Step Into VR. The responses show that users learned of the workshops from a variety of ways with email ( 41 % ) as the most cited method (Figure 4). These marketing emails were sent through distributed listservs that reached nearly the entire campus population. Facebook was called out specifically and represented the second largest marketing method at 29% with the library website, friends, instructors, and digital signage representing the remaining marketing channels.
While new needs continue to emerge, the typical categories of consultation support observed include:
• Recommendations on hardware selection, such as choosing the best VR headset for viewing class content
• Guidance on developing VR applications that incorporate domain-specific curricular content
• Support for curricular integration of VR
• Recommendations on 360 capture media and equipment for documenting environments or experiences, such as the GoPro Fusion and Insta360 One X
• Advice on editing workflows, including software for processing and rendering of 360 content
Alex Fogarty
p. 9
While many library patrons understand the basic concepts of recording video on a camera, 360 cameras present a large divergence from this process in several primary ways. The first is a 360 camera captures every direction at once, so there is no inherent “focus,” and no side of a scene that is not recorded. This significantly changes how someone might compose a video recording, and also adds complexity to post-production, including how to orient viewers within a scene. The second area of divergence is that many of these devices, especially the high-end versions, are recording each lens to a separate data file or memory card and these ftles need to be combined, or “stitched,” at a later time using software specific to the camera. A final concern is that data ftles for high-resolution 3 D capture can be huge, requiring both large amounts of disk space and high-end processors and graphic cards for detailed editing to occur. For example, the Insta360 Pro 2 has 6 sensors all capable of data recording at 120 Mbps for a grand total of 720 Mbps. This translates into 43.2 gigabytes of data for every minute o
My team is investing into the development of STEM Labs for HTC Vive / Oculus Rift and are making them available through the Steam store. This past week, we launched a chemistry experience where students learn to build molecules in a space lab. Our Molecule Builder Lab teaches:
How atoms in a molecule bond
The geometric shape of the molecule
The polarity of the molecule
Since this is an investment we’re making internally, we have made the module available for an accessible cost through the STEAM VR store. I know this group is not for self-promotion, so as a token of appreciation for allowing us to share this information, our team would like to give away up to 10-keys for free for those interested in using this at their academic institutions.
I hope you are all having a great weekend, and again, thank you for allowing us to share this information.
Apple’s known interest in this field has so far focused more on augmented reality (AR) than virtual reality (VR), but the recent reports point to a mixed-reality device, which would be mostly VR but including some real-world elements.
