I heard back from Steam, with exactly the response I expected: Our service model (users reserve our own PC and VR headset, using our Steam software) needs to use their site license program. And even if it’s just on that one PC, we’d still have to run their site license server locally to manage it.
We did an inventory of what it would cost us to purchase a site license for our most popular games: Of our top 25 most played VR games, only 10 have site licenses available at all. Those 10 games would in total cost us slightly more than $3000 per year to license, which strikes me as ridiculous.
But Tara, thanks for pointing out Springboard VR! At a glance it looks really promising. I’m really glad to hear about another option.
-Chad
We ran into the same problem last year with Steam. However, we are now working with Springboard VR. Our head VR specialist says you can test run their interface on a machine for free and that they are putting together an academic package that should be available soon! https://springboardvr.com/
Tara
Amazing timing, Laura! I was just looking into the site license program this week. I wrote up what I’ve learned so far for someone else this morning, shared below. But to sum up, it’s not very promising either from a financial or practical view of the way we use Steam currently (one PC with Steam titles that we’ve purchased under our account, with an attached HTC Vive).
I originally thought this was just a different kind of license for each game, one which allows public use in a library, cafe, etc. But I got some clarification questions answered by Steam support – it’s actually designed for users to log into one of our computers using their own Steam account. They can then check out a game we’ve purchased a site license for, and play it under their account while they’re on our computer.
This also requires running some sort of server locally to handle the checkouts.
So I don’t think this is going to work for us. The pricing is also pretty wild. One of our most popular titles is Space Pirate Trainer – currently $10 paid one time to own individually, or $30/month/seat for a site license subscription. And I’ve seen at least one title that’s free for individual ownership, but somehow costs $20/month/seat for site license.
Much of their documentation is contradictory and out of date.
Even more annoying is that you can’t even see the site license prices until you sign up for a site license account and fill out some legal forms.
Last but not least, many titles, even free ones, do not have site licenses available at all.
I have one more request into Steam support asking how they prefer we purchase things as a library. I’ll let you know what I hear.
Oh, also – you can’t convert an existing Steam account or purchases. You need to create a new one and start from scratch.
-Chad
We’d also like to know if any other libraries had set up the Steam/Valve Site license, which we were just starting to look into ourselves: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=3303-QWRC-3436 – which sounds like it solves many of these problems. Our general counsel has a few issues with the license terms but are willing to consider especially if I can find examples of other institutions utilizing it!
Associate Director Library Information Technology and Digital Strategies
Echoing what Peter said there are no good solutions right now. It would be great if Steam or HTC or Oculus offered site licenses or group accounts, but they don’t. We have 2 HTC Vives that share an account. This causes problems occasionally as it doesn’t like it if two headsets are using the same program. Going offline usually takes care of it. Our 4 Oculus Rifts also share an account but the Oculus store is less problematic than Steam since it only contacts the mother ship when doing an update. If you have the option prepaid cards and individual accounts would be the best way to go but our purchasing department said no.
Edward Iglesias
In our library’s VR Studio, we have a separate library-owned Steam account for each of 7 VR workstation computers. Some have Vives, some have Oculus Rifts at them. We purchase content for each account. We also allow patrons to download free games/tools to those computers.
If a patron owns Steam content that we don’t, they may log in to their personal account and download the game to our computer. So far, this hasn’t posed a problem, except that the added game will show up in that workstation account’s game list, but will not be playable to other patrons. I occasionally delete personal games that are causing confusion to other patrons. Not too many patrons have downloaded content yet so if it gets to be too troublesome we may disallow it in the future.
For the Oculus Rift stations, there is a Steam account as mentioned above, plus the Oculus library. For Oculus, I’ve been able to use one account for all of the workstations. We purchase content once and it’s usable on all the computers from the one account. This has worked fine so far except for playing multi-player online. The single account will not support multiple instances of online play for the same game.
None of these is a perfect solution but they are mostly working as this is a continuous work in progress. Feel free to get in touch off list if you’d like more specific info, etc.
Thanks,
Pete
Hi all,
I was curious if any of your libraries have Steam from Valve installed on your public workstations to drive PC gaming and an HTC Vive? Any tips on how to set that up? Obviously the licensing issue with purchased programs/games through Steam is a problem when you are providing access for a large user base. There are multiple free games/programs available.
How do you handle providing each user with HDD/SSD space on your machines for downloaded games/programs through Steam?
Thanks,
Alex
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Elisandro Cabada
Engineering and Innovation Liaison Librarian
Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering Librarian
Oculus Connect, starting Wednesday in San Jose, California. Facebook’s Oculus VR division promises discussions on how health care, movies and video games are adapting to this still nascent technology. One panel will explore how the disability community can benefit from VR gear and presentations.
Over the summer, Apple and Google announced new technologies called ARKit and ARCore, respectively, that are designed to help iPhones and iPads or any device powered by Google’s Android software marry computer-generated images with the real world.
A $2.99 app, Star Guide AR, highlights stars and constellations in the sky once you point your phone at them. Another, Ikea Place, previews furniture in your home with a tap. Walk around your living room and you can see the furniture you placed while looking through the screen on your phone. So far, both are available only for the iPhone.
App developers I spoke with say they’re excited by augmented reality and believe it may help spur people to buy VR systems as well.
We’re now seeing a move toward mid-range, standalone VR headsets with everything built into the device. Some include their own processors, while others, like the forthcoming Microsoft headset, will work with current desktops. Microsoft’s device claims to do both VR and a modified version of mixed reality
The low end of the VR spectrum has been dominated by Google Cardboard, with over 10 million distributed
Augmented Reality
AR burst into the public’s consciousness with the Pokemon Go craze in 2016. And Snap (formerly Snapchat) expanded the range of their social media platform with the release of Spectacles, their wearable glasses and World Lens filters that add digital objects to your environment. A second version of Spectacles may include far more extensive AR capabilities.
At Facebook’s spring F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg made the case that our mobile cameras will be the first popular AR platform. Apple just announced ARKit for iOS at their June WWDC developers conference.
Mixed Reality
Meta Glasses has been developing its own mixed reality unit that offers a wider field of view than the 40° of HoloLens. And Intel’s Project Alloy promises a “Merged Reality” headset prototype combining both VR and AR by the end of this year.
Kickstarter Projects
Aryzon which is creating a Google Cardboard-like device for simple AR experiences. Another is the NOLO Project, which offers an HTC Vive-like experience with full freedom of movement using only a plastic headset and your phone.
Market research firm Technavio has identified the top five vendors in the global augmented reality (AR) in education market. The companies are EON Reality, DAQRI, GAMOOZ, Magic Leap and QuiverVision, according to a newly published report.
Maya Georgieva, an ed tech strategist, author and speaker with more than 15 years of experience in higher education and global education. Georgieva is co-founder of Digital Bodies, a consulting group that provides news and analysis of VR, AR and wearables in education
Microsoft has been collaborating with its partners, such as HP, Acer, Dell and Lenovo, to develop VR headsets that will work with lower-end desktops. Later this year, the companies will debut headsets for $299, “which is much more affordable compared to HoloLens
many Kickstarter crowdfunding efforts are bound to make high-end headsets more accessible for teaching.
the NOLO project. The NOLO system is meant for mobile VR headsets and gives users that “6 degrees of freedom” (or 6 DoF) motion tracking that is currently only found in high-end headsets.
2) Hand Controllers That Will Bring Increased Interactivity
AltspaceVR h uses avatars and supports multiplayer sessions that allow for socialization and user interaction.
Facebook has been continuing to develop its own VR platform, Facebook Spaces, which is in beta and will be out later this year. LectureVR is a similar platform on the horizon.
Last year at the Windows 10 event, Microsoft announced a slate of upcoming Windows-compatible virtual reality (VR) headsets from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP and other PC manufacturers that would work without desk- or wall-mounted sensors (similar to its HoloLens device). Lenovo is the first to showcase the prototype for its own self-contained VR headset, which is making its debut this week at the annual International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.
Lenovo’s prototype headset is compatible with Microsoft’s Windows Holographic platform. Like the HoloLens, its design features depth-sending cameras located on the front of the device, allowing full-room movement tracking.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 🙂
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!
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
In an address to the VRX conference in San Francisco, noted game developer and tech wizard, Jesse Schell predicted that over 8 million VR gamer headsets will be sold in 2016. Facebook purchased Oculus Rift, presumably laying the groundwork for a future where friends and family will interact in rich virtual spaces. All the major players, including Microsoft, Sony, Samsung, Google and an HTC and Valve partnership are jostling for the consumer headset market.
Experimenting with VR in his classes as part of a project piloted by Seattle-based foundry10, a privately funded research organization that creates partnerships with educators to implement, research and explore the various intersections of emerging technologies and learning, including VR..
As an educational tool, VR might prove transformative. Google Expeditions allows students to take over 100 virtual journeys from ancient Rome to the surface of Mars. It might also have a big impact on social emotional learning (SEL), as VR’s unique ability to produce empathy recently led Wired magazine to explore its potential as “the ultimate empathy machine”. Addressing a persistent anxiety, Suter used Samsung Gear’s Public Speaking Simulator to successfully prepare a few nervous students for class presentations, reporting they felt “much more calm” during the live delivery.
Ethical Considerations
In a recently published article, researchers Michael Madary and Thomas K. Metzinger from Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany review a series of ethical considerations when implementing VR. The illusion of embodiment may provide VR’s greatest value to education, but also lies at the heart of its ethical implementation. Madary and Metzinger believe that VR is not just an evolution from television and video game screens, but a revolution that will have an enormous social impact. In their paper, they claim that:
VR technology will eventually change not only our general image of humanity but also our understanding of deeply entrenched notions, such as “conscious experience,” “selfhood,” “authenticity,” or “realness.”
It’s important to remember that many current VR uses in schools, like Google Expeditions, are not interactive VR, but simply 360-degree video experiences. In these cases, students experience immersive 3D pictures or panoramas, but do not deeply interact with the content. The illusion of embodiment is a product of interactive content and motion tracking, where users can alter and affect their environment and engage with others who share their virtual space. Headsets like the Vive and Occulus Rift fall under this latter category, but it won’t be long before most, if not all, consumer oriented VR technology will be completely immersive and interactive.
1. Long-Term Effects and Prolonged Exposure
2. The Impact of Environment on Agency and Behavior
3. Aggravating Preexisting Psychological or Emotional Issues
4. (Un)Reality and Diminished Real World Interactions
