Escape that Groundhog day feeling by trying out our creative tips on cooking, crafting, ‘camping’, and chucking stuff at Dad
Christmas, Easter, Bonfire Night and Halloween – the events that usually punctuate our year – haven’t felt sufficient in the pandemic, so in my family we’ve gone all out for occasions that would usually pass us by. Cultural appropriation maybe, but it has livened up Groundhog Day dinner times. We had a Diwali party in November, taking advice from an Indian friend on how to do it right, and cooked pakoras, wore new(ish) clothes, played games and covered the kitchen with fairy lights. For Burns Night my four-year-old helped make frozen cranachan, we ate haggis, played a bagpipe Spotify playlist and recited poems, including a welcome address penned by my seven-year-old, whose lines included: “I don’t know why but my dad is wearing a skirt …” (In lieu of a kilt, a peach silk number had to suffice.)
Escape that Groundhog day feeling by trying out our creative tips on cooking, crafting, ‘camping’, and chucking stuff at Dad
Christmas, Easter, Bonfire Night and Halloween – the events that usually punctuate our year – haven’t felt sufficient in the pandemic, so in my family we’ve gone all out for occasions that would usually pass us by. Cultural appropriation maybe, but it has livened up Groundhog Day dinner times. We had a Diwali party in November, taking advice from an Indian friend on how to do it right, and cooked pakoras, wore new(ish) clothes, played games and covered the kitchen with fairy lights. For Burns Night my four-year-old helped make frozen cranachan, we ate haggis, played a bagpipe Spotify playlist and recited poems, including a welcome address penned by my seven-year-old, whose lines included: “I don’t know why but my dad is wearing a skirt …” (In lieu of a kilt, a peach silk number had to suffice.)
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, educators and school boards began exploring ways to approach online learning and stay connected with their students. While many of these virtual experiences and distanced classroom tools aren’t completely new to the education industry, this period of crisis compelled administrators and teachers to learn more about VR, explore its versatility, and experience for themselves how effective it can be in the classroom.
Virtual education through VR was a popular tool prior to the worldwide lockdown. Teachers have noted how presenting information in VR versus traditional methods like lectures, powerpoints, or textbooks, allow students to digest and understand the material quicker and more thoroughly. Specific places, moments in history or complex systems like the human body become more real and new information about these topics is no longer abstract.
Like any tool, however, how VR is used in the classroom to greatest effectiveness is the next question – while we can inherently understand the value of being immersed in a topic of study, the experience of VR can be an isolating one. Using this technology in education must come with its own process to be fully integrated into the curriculum.
Keep it Student-Centered
VR learning works best when information or story-based learning is presented from a first-person perspective. Since VR targets the user’s audio and visual learning centred experiences feel like you’re present and have a first-person perspective, allowing students to relate to the content more and to take in information from their own perspective. With using these capabilities in education applications, students are able to see topics that are covered in the syllabus with better context. There’s also an opportunity to explore concepts that would be either too expensive to demonstrate in class. This may mean witnessing science experiments that are too dangerous or expensive to reproduce, exploring biology and body systems in detail that would be impossible for most public schools, or witnessing daily customs from remote locations in a social studies course that brings the world to life without leaving the classroom.
Pay Attention to the Sequence
Experienced teachers know that whether they are with the same students in a classroom all day or seeing different groups for specific classes, timing and order of lessons are an important part of the curriculum and how it is received by students. For longer classes, you may notice that sometimes your student’s attention may drop off close to the middle portion of the class. There have been psychological studies on how people can recall information better when it’s presented towards the beginning and end – known as the Serial Position Effect. If you tend to notice your student’s attention starting to drift around halfway through the lesson, following the format of having more challenging concepts presented in the beginning, transitioning into VR learning, and recapping everything at the end could keep them focused and engaged with an exciting yet informative experience.
VR allows students some time to focus, blocking out the classroom and its distractions and can reinforce concepts introduced not only by being immersive but by being individually paced, viewed by a single person in a headset. However, since it can be an isolating experience, and monitoring multiple students’ headsets at once may be challenging, in-person re-caps and discussions about the content can round out the lesson.
Give Opportunities to Collaborate
The idea of discussing what was witnessed in VR brings us to another key part of using this media in the classroom – learning to hold discussions around something that may have been viewed individually and extract a group experience. Although the teacher is the main leader of discussions in the classroom, peer learning can be just as effective in nurturing a student’s understanding of a subject. This informal way of teaching and learning not only helps students practice and review what they have just learned, but it creates an active learning space where they can slowly build up their confidence with the content. While VR may sometimes get a bad reputation for being isolating, there are countless opportunities to make it collaborative. This could take the form in completing a group project inside a virtual environment or allow students to take turns in the space and come back together for a discussion. Plus, especially for classrooms still doing remote learning, virtual environments provide the perfect platform for students to still meet and work together regardless of the location.
Integrate VR with What You Already Use
VR is an incredibly powerful tool, one that can really transform the future of learning. However, for some of the reasons already discussed, and its cost and the logistical challenges of monitoring headset activity, we anticipate it being used in certain situations and covering certain topics in a limited way. A common misconception when it comes to VR applications is the need to rewrite whole curriculums and syllabuses in order to accommodate using the technology. But the beauty of VR is that it can be shaped, moulded, and work alongside the topics and assignments already created. VR should ultimately be used as an enhancement to existing content and an opportunity to explore what might seem impossible to view – but it will never be able to cover all topics – some things are better discussed and experienced in person. Tools used in the classroom should ultimately provide added value and support to the class.
Keep it Fun!
VR is new enough that most people haven’t used it extensively. The best practices are evolving for this new media, so acknowledging that the best laid plans may go awry is part of adding this to the classroom. Experiences may take different amounts of time than were allotted, or students may be so interested in the format they need to repeat the experience to take in the content. So don’t forget that the entertainment and fun value are part of the tool. Much like when computers were first introduced to the classroom, along with the software they were running, they provided an education in learning something new, and engaging with a new tool as part of the learning challenge. Most of the educational applications for VR present subjects and information in a game-like manner, making it much more enjoyable to learn about subjects that can sometimes be a little dry or boring. Like many adults, students probably need a few minutes when they begin a VR experience to just look around and take it in before diving into content, so be sure to build in time for exploration. Most hardware headsets are pretty intuitive, requiring only seconds to learn so that shouldn’t be a barrier.
Virtual Education – The Next Generation of Learning
While most educators haven’t had the opportunity to get well acquainted with VR, the benefits for students to be immersed and see what would otherwise be impossible should make the technology a game-changer in education. It’s time to start exploring solutions that go beyond lengthy textbooks and pixelated diagrams. When virtual education has been carefully thought out and done right, it can make a world of a difference in helping students understand concepts and theories immediately.
Much of the current interest in virtual reality (VR) centres around how it might be a new format to better engage the brain in learning, and how this new medium impacts memory retention, and to better engage the interest of those viewing VR.
While this immersive technology certainly excels in those objectives and has the potential to significantly disrupt training and education, When it comes to making bold statements with how VR directly affects how our brain accepts and retains information, we need to go back and look into the science of how exactly virtual applications are able to do just that.
So in today’s post, we’ll be taking a deep dive into how exactly VR helps with memory retention and the certain areas this technology seamlessly targets by looking at two studies published in 2018.
Intro to Attention & Memory
Before we start unpacking VR and memory retention, let’s briefly take a crash course in how our brain understands, processes, and recalls information.
Encoding refers to the brain’s natural process for converting information into a construct that will be stored in either short or long-term memory. Boundless Psychology says this is like, “hitting “Save” on a computer file”. Your brain constantly is filtering, processing, and organizing information into these categories in order to store what’s important in order to avoid overwhelming you with remembering every single piece of information.
You have probably experienced this in school especially when cramming for tests and exams, trying to read and remember the content you need to know to pass a course. However, the key to remembering and recalling information is transitioning what you’ve learned from short term memory into long term. In order to do that, neural connections need to be strengthened through repetition and reinforced by targeting our senses like sight and sound.
Improves Recall Significantly
In a study conducted by Eric Krokos, Catherine Plaisant, and Amitabh Varshney, researchers from the University of Maryland, their main objective was to explore whether participants learn better in a virtual environment versus traditional platforms like desktop computers or tablets. Specifically, their main focus was whether VR affects a person’s recall ability. Researchers immersed participants in a “memory palace”, where people recall an object or item by placing it in an imaginary physical location. With presenting information in this format, researchers made use of spatial mnemonic encoding, which in layman’s terms refers to the brain’s ability to spatially organize thoughts and memories.
What researchers found was that participants scored at least 10% higher in recall ability with a VR application. While this number may seem small, researchers share that this finding was statistically significant, and not attributed to chance. Being able to visualize and see in an immersive space was the key to this improvement in recall results. That’s because, with VR, the experience gives participants a true feel in stepping into a space and allows them to create their own lived experiences digitally. It is the act of leveraging a person’s natural ability to sense body position, movement, and acceleration that can enhance learning and recall.
Leads to Better Focus
In the same study, participants described how immersion played an important role in helping them stay focused on the task. Since researchers were using a Head-Mounted Display (HMD) headset to compare to learning via a desktop, participants were able to use and experience hardware that provided the most immersive effect. Like the HTC Vive or Oculus Rift, HMD’s fit similarly to goggles, featuring a rim that is purposely there to block out light and other extraneous stimuli we would pick up in our peripheral vision.
This sets up the perfect environment for users to direct their full attention to the VR experience, which is exactly what participants of this study found. It was this zoning in effect that helped participants experience the “superior sense of the spatial awareness which they claimed was important to their success”. Not only did full immersion help participants’ overall focus and help them perform better, but researchers also found that all but two of the 40 participants actually preferred using the HMD for the task compared to a regular desktop.
More Enjoyment with Spatial Presence
Regarding spatial awareness, the study by Yeonhee Cho from Syracuse University looked specifically into the effects of having a digital presence in VR and how it impacts memory retention. One striking finding is the function of enjoyment in memory and recall. Similar to the Krokos, Plaisant, and Varshney study, Cho was comparing learning with desktop applications and immersive VR experiences in relation to learning a second language. Cho’s participants had a mixture of genders and backgrounds but shared one thing in common: having zero prior education or experience with the Korean language.
The findings from this study partially focused on enjoyment while learning and highlighted how being entertained affects the whole learning process. Especially when navigating unfamiliar topics or environments, Cho notes that “enjoyment reduces stress or fear”, giving participants a new sense of motivation and something to look forward to. And since VR is still heavily associated with game-based applications and entertainment, the tendency to view the hardware in this way can actually be favourable. Cho found that game-based systems use enjoyment to build confidence and motivation in users without a negative response.
The Science of Virtual Reality and Memory Retention
It’s safe to say that participants from both studies echoed an overwhelmingly positive response by using VR during learning applications. However, the question still stands: does VR help with memory retention? In short, yes, absolutely. By targeting how we learn and process information, capturing our focus all while making it fun and exciting, VR checks off so many of the boxes that will make experiences unforgettable.
While these findings are particularly useful for curriculum writers and the education industry, there are also positive implications for adults in on-the-job training and in helping people learn and retain safety procedures or crisis responses. There are also implications for VR marketing, with a tool that captures client attention and makes your product or service stand out from the crowd. VR is a new medium without a lot of studies into its societal impact but its ability to leave impressions on memory and to help with retention have significant implications across industries and verticals.
School corridors are mostly absent of life these days with classrooms left vacant. Playgrounds are deserted — only abandoned swings swaying eerily in the breeze. Everything has an almost dystopian feel; it’s almost like a Half-Life game.
Needless to say, schools have looked very different lately.
[UploadVR regularly commissions freelance writers to review products, write stories, interview subjects, and contribute op-ed pieces to the site. This article is a feature piece from an experienced journalist unaffiliated with UploadVR.]
I’m watching a video from Szkoła 33, a high school in the city of Poznań, western Poland. The camera tracks through the school, taking in rows of empty tables, discarded toys, and unused equipment. Eventually, it fades out to a teacher, who welcomes the children to the lesson.
Then the footage cuts away completely, and Half-Life: Alyx begins.
Dystopia might be correct – but in fact, the game was used by Szkoła 33 to conduct lessons for children in lockdown. A total of six VR sessions in Half-Life: Alyx were made by the school to teach various subjects, with many of the videos lasting over two hours. The lessons combined live and pre-recorded material, and were uploaded to Facebook, Twitch, and YouTube
“We decided to use VR in lessons because it seemed like a good opportunity to try something new and to engage our students in online classes,” explains Katarzyna Sut, English and Spanish teacher, and webpage administrator.
“The pandemic had just started back then, the schools were closed, and we wanted to interest our students in the classes somehow. We also hoped that it would help them with the uncomfortable situation everyone found themselves in – those first few weeks were not easy for kids, being on lockdown in their homes and not able to roam freely.”
Poland went into an early lockdown in an attempt to mitigate the spread of the virus, with schools closing onMarch 11th, 2020. Online learning was made compulsory on March 25th.
A mere five days later came Szkoła 33’s first foray into VR lessons, with the teachers keen to combine educational material with entertainment value as a way to try and keep children amused at home. Still, the lessons took a lot of work behind the scenes.
“A VR studio actually came to our school,” recalls Sut. “They made the magic happen right in our classes!”
The teachers cooperated with local media company OFFshot to make the Half-Life: Alyx VR classes. OFFshot had been previously working with the school on promotional videos for recruitment, but after hearing about other innovative uses for VR, they realized it could be used for livestream lessons too.
“VR is the future of creation,” believes OFFshot’s Adrian Michalski. “Projects like ours show that VR can be introduced more widely into universal teaching.”
Equipped with an HTC VIVE Pro and three cameras, the school recorded languages, math, and science lessons, with the teachers using pens inside the game to draw diagrams, as well as teaching children vocabulary in a virtual kitchen.
It’s a bit shaky at first: Michalski explains that the teachers had never used VR before, and only trained for half an hour before the lessons were filmed – but they mainly go off without a hitch.
The debut, on March 30th, was an English class. We see the teacher explore the space curiously: she comments on the weather, explains what she (and the viewers) can see, stops to pick up objects. It’s just as the game should be played, but with a twist.
“Here’s a mug,” she muses. “I was drinking a coffee this morning.”
Then – and heedlessly ignoring an incoming call from Eli Vance – she turns to some markers, and begins to scribble some English vocabulary onto the windows.
There’s an experimental feel to the videos, and a small picture-in-picture in the corner of the screen shows exactly what’s happening in the real world: the teacher – clad in a VR headset – tiptoeing around and drawing into the empty space of the real-life classroom.
A typical scene when playing Half-Life: Alyx the “proper” way.
“This was a nice touch,” adds Sut. “This way the kids could see something familiar from their usual days.”
And according to her, the move to VR teaching certainly seemed to pay off.
“We believe the students liked them,” she says. “From younger kids to teenagers, we have seen all of the age groups of our school gather together on Facebook to watch them. Going by the emojis they shared and reacted with, as well as the comments, they enjoyed them very much.”
“We also hope they got something out of them, knowledge-wise, but as to this, time will tell!” she jokes.
Michalski agrees that the VR lessons showed a lot of promise.
“The number of positive comments surprised us. People wrote to us: ‘I have been to school for a long time ago, but I watched all maths lessons and I am waiting for the next ones,’ or “I watched the whole lesson with the children. Thank you!’
“VR in schools has great potential.”
News of Szkoła 33’s adaptation to lockdown learning spread across Polish media, and its popularity has also changed the way the school is thinking about future lessons.
“We do have plans for future classes made using VR, but their amount and the number of students involved will depend on the pandemic situation after the summer holidays,” explains Sut. “We hope to be back at school in September, and if it all works out, we plan to have regular classes, at school, using the VR technology. Preferably, all kids will be able to take such a class at least once a week, but that depends on the situation around us, too.”
If the VR lessons can go ahead in future, they will be used in classrooms and online, teaching content across the school curriculum. For younger children, says Sut, VR provides an interesting alternative to mainstream education. For older students, it opens up even more possibilities.
“We can use VR to take them on virtual tours to another country, to another planet – the sky is the limit here,” she gushes. “The cognitive process becomes more natural, as opposed to just reading about things in books.
“VR looks very promising. We are very optimistic about it right now.”
A new HoloLens 2 application uses volumetric capture of a COVID-19 patient to help UK doctors and nurses safely identify symptoms.
HoloPatient: COVID-19 is a free extension of GIGXR’s HoloPatient platform, produced in partnership with the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) and the new Resilient XR consortium. The app presents users with a ‘standardized patient’ showing COVID-19 symptoms. The patient was captured using Dimension’s London-based Mixed Reality Capture studio, with features a rig with over 100 cameras that record humans ten stitch their actions back together as a 3D asset. The company says it shot the footage under safe conditions.
“Shoots are looking a little different at Dimension today, in the name of the health and safety of both the crew and the general public,” said Adam Smith, Head of Production at Dimension. “In line with advice from the APA and the Government, protocols include adherence to the 2m social distancing rule, strict use of PPE and regular temperature checks by a medic on set. To limit the number of people present, we have remote directing capabilities, streaming a live feed of the action from a wide selection of camera viewpoints. It’s not traditional but it’s efficient and hasn’t impacted quality in our experience.”
The app, meanwhile, takes users through four stages of COVID-19 illness, providing a safe means for doctors and nurses to recognize symptoms seen in a typical case.
Resilient is a group consisting of UK-based immersive technology companies such as Dimension, tech hub Digital Catapult and VISR VR. Also included are developer agencies like Fracture Reality and Make Real. It’s also supported by the University of Leeds’ Centre for Immersive Technologies and University College London. Along with this HoloLens app, the group has also been using volumetric capture to deliver online training videos in which viewers can zoom in and inspect processes in greater detail.
The 2020 Emmy Awards ceremony is set for September 20 this year and, as expected, a few VR experiences have crept their way into the nominations across two interactive categories.
The nominations for Outstanding Original Interactive Program Category:
Rebuilding Notre Dame, a VR documentary from TARGO.
The Messy Truth VR Experience, an experience starring Winston Duke (better known as M’Baku from Black Panther) which focuses on race.
When We Stayed Home, a compilation of 360 degree videos from TARGO, documenting the empty streets of several cities in April of this year.
The three VR experiences are the sole nominations in the category this year, facing no non-VR competition. For example, VR experiences in the same category last year were also up against other non-VR interactive titles, such as the choose-your-own-adventure program You vs Wild available on Netflix, starring Bear Grills. The award was taken home by NASA’s InSight Mars Landing in 2019, beating out VR experiences Travelling While Black and First Man VR.
If you want to check them out, Rebuilding Notre Dame and When We Stayed Home are both available to view on Oculus Quest through Oculus TV.
The other area featuring a VR title this year is the similar, but slightly different, Outstanding Derivative Interactive Program category. The nominations for that are:
Big Mouth Guide To Life by Social Life and Netflix
Doctor Who: The Runaway by BBC and Passion Animation Studios
The former is not a VR experience, so here’s hoping The Runaway manages to bring it home. Ian checked out the 10-minute experience earlier this year, and called it a must-see for fans of the show. It’s available for free on Steam and the Oculus Store for PC VR.
What titles are you hoping take home the awards in September? Let us know in the comments.
Interested in developing AR/VR applications but don’t know where to start. Start by choosing one or more of these free workshops which will serve as a perfect introduction into XR development.
Learn the best practices of designing VR experiences with hand tracking (highly recommend if you own a hand tracking device such as Quest or HoloLens2 – open to everyone!)
Learn how create dynamic face-tracking filters used in Snapchat or Instagram with our instructor, Nakisa Donnelly. By the end of the workshop, you might have your own mobile filter that responds to the movement of your face. Project assets are provided.
Recreate a Bow and Arrow VR project simulation from scratch in Unity. This workshop serves as a good introduction to virtual reality development. Project assets are provided.
Learn how to set up an augmented reality project in Unity and use SDKs like Vuforia and AR Foundation for plane tracking applications. Project assets are provided.
Explore the basics of artificial intelligence and different types of intelligent agents. You’ll learn how to create a project with goal-oriented action planning systems commonly used in game development and simulations.
There’s a huge difference in how XR applications are perceived. Former Oculus Studios and HoloLens 2 design engineer explains and shows how to optimize and polish your work to look and feel complete.
MARS is a game-changer in the AR creative workflow. With its unique interface, developers can create intelligent AR apps that are context-aware and responsive to the physical environment and will work in any location with any type of data.
Schell Games is releasing HistoryMaker VR on Steam just in time for the new school year that’ll let players embody a range of historical figures.
The software allows students to import scripts and record videos embodied as historical figures such as Benjamin Franklin, Harriet Tubman, Tecumseh, George Washington Carver, Abigail Adams, and others.
The software is directed at middle school students and meant to enable them to deliver speeches in VR embodied as one of eight characters from United States history. Stages can be customized with various backgrounds and props and videos can be exported and then edited for review by teachers or classmates.
HistoryMaker VR should debut on Steam on August 13 for $9.99 with compatibility mentioned for the Oculus Rift and Rift S, but it is also pitched as being free for educators with complementary desktop software for managing a classroom and helping students.
Schell Games is the studio behind popular VR titles including I Expect You To Die and Until You Fall, as well as a range of other experiences both inside VR and out. HistoryMaker VR looks very similar to Mindshow (which was pulled from Steam in recent months) and the more recently launched FlipSide Studio. The educational focus of HistoryMaker, though, combined with the fun that can come with play acting may make for a potent combination and comes just in time as U.S. schools grapple with the prospect of the 2020-2021 school year being impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. With millions of kids singing history-inspired songs from Hamilton after its recent release on Disney+, and The Under Presents: The Tempest showing the power of acting in VR, we’re curious to see what kids and schools do with the software when it is released.
