A new immersive training facility and program, the Immersive Technology Institute (ITI), has been launched Luton, UK in a collaboration between Central Bedfordshire College (CBC) and AI and VR development firm AiSolve. The Institute will put VR and AR technologies in the hands of students in conjunction with education training software and content to create an interactive curriculum.
The Institute will teach students technical skills, and says the VR and AR tech will “allow colleges to work creatively with teachers, trainers and lecturers to reimagine their teaching approach, giving them more time to teach the social skills and techniques that are so vital within the workplace, for example, how to approach a certain situation or how to respond to a manager.”
CBC is a regional college of further education focusing on providing students with knowledge and skills pertinent to the domestic and international workforce. Recent investments of £4 million on a new Engineering and Technology Centre on the Leighton Blizzard campus and £15.5 million on the main campus (Dunstable) aim to provide state of the art facilities for students.
AiSolve is an immersive software development firm based in Luton, that apply their software across multiple business disciplines such as retail, leisure, education, and healthcare. Their area of specialization is in artificial intelligence driven VR and AR applications and content.
CEO of AiSolve, Devi Kolli, plans to head the Immersive Technology Institute initiative on her company’s behalf stating, “Virtual and mixed reality have finally reached a level of sophistication from both a hardware and software perspective. This translates to an ability to help educate and train students who will become the workforce of tomorrow.”
Ali Hadawi CBE, Principal, and Chief Executive of Central Bedfordshire College, will lead the college programme, advising, “All around England, we’re facing a skills gap that widens each year. Employees are under-prepared for what employers demand of them, particularly in specific, skills-based jobs. We see VR and MR as a solution to this problem as we can harness this advanced technology to deliver high impact, low cost, customised learning that teaches the skills most in demand.”
Image courtesy CBC
A launch event for the Institute was held earlier this month, co-hosted by AiSolve and CBC, at the Leighton Buzzard Engineering and Technology Center. In November 2017, ITI will begin its first pilot program for immersive skills training.
Today’s educational system is static, generalized and puts less focus on individual self-development than it perhaps should. To make matters worse, students often don’t understand why they are learning the things that they’re learning, which makes certain classes feel arbitrary and purposeless in the face of their personal ambitions.
Lucas Rizzotto
Guest Article by Lucas Rizzotto
Lucas Rizzotto is an award-winning XR creator, industry speaker, and entrepreneur working on the the realities to come. You can follow his creations and thoughts on Facebook, Twitter, Medium or Instagram.
What could be done to fix these issues and take education to a new level? What could make education more exciting, fun and practical? I believe it comes down to three simple ideas (that aren’t new by any means) which can finally be fully explored with smart use of technology.
These keys are personalized learning, experiential learning and mastery-based learning. In Part 1, Today’s Problems we talked about the challenges of implemented these education concepts (we recommend reading it before continuing with this piece). Here in Part 2, Tomorrow’s Solutions we’ll explore a possible path for education in the future, mixing Artificial Intelligence, Immersive Technologies and several new design paradigms that could change education forever.
The Dawn of Immersive Education
Technology has continuously revolutionized modern society for the past two centuries, and it shows no signs of stopping — if anything, it’s speeding up. How we work, learn, play and connect with each other is redefined almost every decade, and much of it has to do with the advent of new computing platforms: first with personal computers, then smartphones — and now with Immersive Technologies.
What do I mean by Immersive Technologies? Virtual Reality headsets, Augmented Reality glasses and everything in between — if you’re new to these concepts, hop over to this article real quick, because they’ll be a big deal moving forward.
Get ready to start wearing computers… on your face! | Image courtesy ODG
There’s no doubt in my mind that immersive tech is the world’s next big computing platform — it does things modern computers can’t do and completely redefines our relationship with information, much like the revolutionary platforms that preceded it. Suddenly you can physically interact with the digital world (with your actual hands) and have it live all around you instead within the confines of a screen — and while we’re still in its early days, much of the promise it holds can already be seen today.
When it first appeared, Immersive Tech was thought of as a gaming-centric medium, but ever since its mainstream introduction with the Oculus Rift, creators begged to disagree. Today we have a variety of VR applications focused around productivity, art, data visualization and much more. Similar immersive technologies like Augmented/Mixed Reality have also been on the rise, giving us new mind-bending ways to display and interact with information in our real world like it’s actually there.
Image courtesy Northway Games
The Microsoft HoloLens is a great example of this —now a two year old device, it’s still one of the most impressive pieces of technology existing today. Not only it can create holograms that look and feel real, the HoloLens understands your environment — it knows where your furniture is, your walls, and everything else, and uses that information to seamlessly blend digital and physical worlds into your perception of reality.
Immersive content is not bound by the laws of physics — educators can create ‘impossible’ experiences that engage students in all-new ways.
Couple that with all the other advancements the technology is having with hand-tracking, haptics and deep learning and you can see that it’s only a matter of years before we’re touching holograms in our own home with devices more reminiscent of glasses instead of silly looking headsets. This is huge. Immersive technologies are inherently experiential, built from the ground up to convince humans that what they see is real — at the same time, immersive content is not bound by the laws of physics, meaning that creators can orchestrate ‘impossible experiences’ at relatively low costs — be it taking the viewer to the moon, to a beach in California, or a castle 500 years in the past, all costs about the same to create. For education, this could be everything.
Biology, for instance, is usually taught through textbooks, slides and drawings. But some start ups like The Body VR are taking an immersive approach to education, letting you travel the human body in person and actively interact with it instead of just looking through images on a book.
Image courtesy The Body VR
Along similar lines is the start up Medivis, which is redefining anatomy learning. Usually medical students are forced to learn human anatomy through several illustrations, having to desperately combine all the 2D images they see in their head to attempt to get a sense on how it all comes together in three dimensions — but MediVis is building an entire learning platform that allows you to visualize the human body a fully 3D, life size, holographic format, accurately tagging every single piece of your body — no need for books, drawings, or expensive cadavers.
Image courtesy Microsoft
Other examples include MyLab(which I designed), a mixed-reality Chemistry app that gives students a holographic periodic table they can use to spawn and combine elements on the go, and Universe Sandbox, which allows you to navigate the Universe as you visit physically accurate star systems and also create your own.
Mind you, this is just the start, and most of these projects are being built by a small number of people without any external funding at all. Now, with only the work associated with creating a small 3D game, we have the ability to take students anywhere and teach them about virtually anything from a completely different and fully participative perspective. And because the cost of creating these experiences is so low, we’re bound to see a number of innovations in design and interaction that introduce new ways to learn we haven’t even conceived of before, especially as creation tools becomes accessible to the point that anyone can bring the experiences they imagine to life.
The beauty of software is that once you get it right, the whole world can have access to it. You just have to copy it.
In the long term, we’re looking at education being approached not as a series of bullet points, but as interactive worlds that students can navigate at their leisure, marking a huge design-shift for education as it proceeds to become more akin to entertainment than a passive obligation. Now, concepts can become characters, ‘exercises’ and ‘exams’ can be seamlessly embedded into worlds and storylines as activities, and students are free to literally explore and immerse themselves in the subjects they’re learning.
Universe Sandbox provides beautiful opportunities for learning — and chaos. | Image courtesy Giant Army
And there’s more: the kind of data you can collect from Immersive Experiences is the stuff of dreams for personalizing education like never before.Given the degree of creative opportunity and how immersive education plays with the human brain, I believe it’s reasonable to assume that immersive education will become the norm one day. A number of studies are being conducted today to assess the full effectiveness of this new approach, but the potential is here: immersive education can be visual, social, magical, interactive and emotionally engaging — all while it sticks to your brain like a fully-textured memory.
Education is an odd bird: we all know it could be better, while at the same time it is the best it has ever been in human history. For the last two centuries the world went through a great expansion in learning: our literacy rate skyrocketed from 12% to 88% worldwide, and Primary, Secondary and Tertiary education have all seen drastic growth (in schools and students), breaking records on almost a yearly basis.
Lucas Rizzotto
Guest Article by Lucas Rizzotto
Lucas Rizzotto is an award-winning XR creator, industry speaker, and entrepreneur working on the the realities to come. You can follow his creations and thoughts on Facebook, Twitter, Medium or Instagram.
Our educative curriculum has also evolved, embracing our continuous growing understanding of the world — and the recent boom of the internet has brought self-education to the masses in new and exciting ways, turning websites like Khan Academy, TED, Wikipedia, and YouTube into some of the biggest free knowledge hubs in the planet. Imperfections aside, we owe a lot of who we are to this faulty system, and its growth in reach has been phenomenal.
How we teach, however, has yet to change:
Contemporary learning is still very much archaic. We group students arbitrarily around age, have them go to a physical building 5 times a week to listen to adults speak for about 6 hours, and just kind of hope that all involved parties are qualified enough to keep students engaged and predictably moving through a static educational curriculum.
It works to an extent, but it is not pleasant for anyone — teachers have a lot on their plate, from lesson and assignment planning, to teaching, grading and the expectation of giving hundreds of students individualized attention. On the student side, they are forced to adhere to strict timelines and live under the rule of fear instead of curiosity, with the constant fear of failure looming as they’re assigned labels ranging from A to F at the end of each term.
Image courtesy KU School of Medicine–Wichita
Today’s educational system is static, generalized and puts less focus on individual self-development than it perhaps should. To make matters worse, students often don’t understand why they are learning the things that they’re learning, which makes certain classes feel arbitrary and purposeless in the face of their personal ambitions (and has a number of neurological implications we’ll soon discuss).
With that being said, what could be done to fix these issues and take education to a new level? What could make education more exciting, fun and practical? I believe it comes down to three simple ideas (that aren’t new by any means) which can finally be fully explored with smart use of technology.
These keys are personalized learning, experiential learning and mastery-based learning. In this article, we’re going to explore these ideas as well as a possible path for education in the future, mixing Artificial Intelligence, Immersive Technologies and several new design paradigms that could change education forever.
Personalized Learning
Fully personalized experiences are almost a standard in the tech world today — but not in education. | Image courtesy Will Keightley (CC BY-SA 2.0)
‘Personalized Learning’ refers to a diverse variety of programs, learning experiences, instructional approaches, and strategies that address the distinct learning preferences, interests, aspirations, weaknesses, or cultural backgrounds of individual students. The result of this is an educational experience that’s more fitting to you as an individual and maximizes what you can get out of each class.
This approach makes intuitive sense, and there has been a rising pool of scientific evidence backing these ideas up every year. A recent report commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has found that students in schools using personalized learning strategies made greater academic progress. Additionally, countless neuroscience studies have shown the how personalized experiences positively affect how the brain receives information, providing some relevant ideas about how learning works to the synapse-level.
“A student must care about new information or consider it important for it to be stored as a long-term memory. Memories with personal meaning are most likely to become relational and long-term memories available for later retrieval.” — Dr. Judy Will, Neurologist & Educator.
This is a powerful concept, and it shows that for students to learn anything they need to be convinced that the information being shown is important. To properly teach, you must first inspire, and personalized learning is as much about knowing how to teach an individual as it is about how to convince them that the information is worth knowing — and this is hard. Different students respond differently to distinct motivations, but this is why the most popular teachers tend to be inspirational: they don’t just throw information at students for them to process, but they also inspire and awake their class’s interest and curiosity — once a student finds a subject cool, everything changes for their brain.
Teach with a focus on how the brain functions, and the result is an education that works instinctively.
So if personalized education is so important, why do we barely see it in schools? In today’s system, giving students true individualized attention would require dozens if not hundreds of specialized hires per institution— and even if we did have all those people available, we still lack the proper methods to gather and process personal student data in large scales to create actionable results. Despite these challenges, some schools are still finding ways to explore these concepts to a degree, but the true potential of personalized education remains largely unfulfilled.
Full personalized learning also requires a fluid, flexible and non-linear educational curriculum to be fully idealized — this is the only way you can embrace student’s differences and create distinct learn paths for each one — unfortunately, this just happens to be the antithesis of today’s rigid solutions.
Thankfully, new developments in design & technology have been generating promising new paths for personalized learning — but before we get to that, let’s talk about another key: mastery-based learning.
The education-focused Mars 2030 launches today on SteamVR for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, soon to come to PSVR. With 40 square kilometers of explorable terrain, the experience successfully achieves its main objective: to make the user feel like they are on Mars. However, while its stunning canvas has great potential, its execution currently suffers from a lack of features, and a number of technical problems.
Update (8/8/17): After initially providing Road to VR with what was said to be a launch build of Mars 2030, developer FMG Labs decided at the last minute to postpone the launch of the game. The release build, now available on Steam, addressed many of the issues I identified in my earlier hands-on with the pre-launch build. This update offers an overview of the experience based on the launch build, while our impressions from the pre-launch hands-on remain below.
While Mars 2030’s overall presentation remains a mixed bag, the newer build has resulted in a much more playable experience. Most notably, the menu system is now largely functional, the camera reset feature is clearer, and ‘comfort mode’ has effective snap turning. Starting from the opening menu, the game now states immediately how to recenter the camera. The app now remembers graphics settings, and the save slots appear to be reliable.
The deployment sequence has been polished, with my virtual hands no longer clipping through my knees. Once landed, the tutorial now reliably appears, with useful HUD elements showing controller inputs. The ‘teleport’ feature is still always available (not necessarily a bad thing, but perhaps it should be an option), but the comfort mode is now fully functional, making the teleports instantaneous rather than a quick dash, and the right stick (or right touchpad on Vive) performs 45 degree snap turns.
Strangely, vehicle travel seems even more redundant in the current build. Not only can you teleport around so much faster than the SEV can move, but you can also ‘fast travel’ to every site instantly. In the preview build, I had to physically reach a site on foot (or hit autopilot in the SEV, where it would drive in real-time), and place the flag to unlock the ‘fast travel’ function for that site. There was a small sense of achievement in reaching each location in this way, which has been lost now that you can simply fast travel everywhere from the beginning.
Many information points marked with floating ‘i’ icons are now active (they were totally absent from the preview build), providing some written details about the equipment and how it might be used for the Mars project in the future. The Habitat in particular is full of information points, which certainly adds to the educational value. The software now remembers my ‘geolab progress’, and the microscope analysis is more stable, but remains fairly unintuitive with motion controls.
The app continues to feel more suited to gamepad input, but motion control isn’t as awkward as it once was. The super-sensitive tilt inputs for the vehicle have now been significantly toned down. And thanks to the camera reset buttons, it is now practical to enjoy the opening sequence and vehicle sequences while seated, and then stand while exploring on foot or walking around the labs. However, this can result in some odd animation problems, with the virtual body sometimes looking like it is crouched in mid-air, or with the legs not reaching the ground.
The experience no longer feels quite so ‘unfinished’, but it remains rough around the edges. For instance, I’ve loaded my save to find myself ‘stuck’ underneath the SEV, rocks I pick up will occasionally fall through the surface, and the software seems to suffer from some pretty serious performance issues, possibly relating to fast travel. Each time I appeared in a new location, the framerate seemed to drop further (reloading the save would restore performance). Hopefully FMG Labs continues to optimise Mars 2030 with future updates.
Update (7/27/17, 9:28AM PT): A spokesperson for FMG Labs says the launch of the experience has seen a slight delay. There’s no indication on the new launch date yet, however the game’s Steam page currently indicates availability beginning tomorrow, July 28th. The original article below has been updated to reflect this new information.
Original Article (7/27/17): Unquestionably, Mars 2030’s greatest assets are… its assets. The vast landscape is covered in detailed geometry and textures, and the habitat, vehicles, and other equipment are modelled to a high quality. Combined with convincing lighting and shaders, the result is, at times, very impressive.
The Mawrth Vallis region has been reproduced using satellite data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE, with topographical data accurate to within 30cm of the actual elevation. As described in our first experience of Mars 2030 at GTC 2016, the team went to great lengths to represent the martian terrain in the most realistic manner, using Unreal Engine 4’s physically-based rendering. “Our lead environment artist actually worked with a NASA geologist to find the correct reflectance factors to really get the materials to be as photorealistic as possible,” said Justin Sonnekalb, a designer on the project.
Available soon via SteamVR for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, the Mars 2030 journey begins on the final descent towards the planet. I’m told to push the giant ‘detach’ button, which is where the first body Presence problems become apparent.
The inverse kinematics on the avatar’s arms look odd, probably because the hands (and their resting position) don’t seem to line up agreeably with where my hands fit on the Vive controllers. My character is seated, so I feel compelled to sit too. Resting the controllers on my knees, the virtual hands clip through my virtual legs. It’s possible to reset the camera and sit in such a way that this doesn’t happen, but it would certainly benefit from some fine tuning here. (After being spoiled by the incredible hand animation in Lone Echo, this kind of thing stands out.) While this could be explained as the result of maintaining 1:1 tracking of the hands, the hands also clip through the legs if you play it with a gamepad, where you have no direct control of your arms—something that doesn’t occur in the rover, so I suspect it can be fixed.
After the landing sequence, I appear ‘outside’, with my avatar now standing. The problem is, if I then physically stand, I end up floating above the surface. So I start hunting for a camera reset button, and unfortunately, the Vive controller map (and indeed every controller map) is blank. I eventually figured out that the camera reset is pressing the left trigger and right ‘grip’ button simultaneously, but I still haven’t discovered the shortcut for gamepad. A tutorial sequence is then supposed to activate, but over multiple restarts of the software, it only seemed to trigger 50% of the time.
Image courtesy FMG Labs
I’m instructed to move around, use the scanner, and pick up a few rocks. Here, the physics system seems to struggle, and it’s not just from the weaker gravity. Tasked with placing flags at notable locations, these act as a checkpoint and can then be used for fast travel. Several times, the flags ended up flying out of my hand rather than elegantly fitting into place, and the problem seemed even more prevalent when using a gamepad.
Image courtesy FMG Labs
After this, you jump into the rover, and my character is sitting again. I grab the virtual joystick with my left hand. Unfortunately, when operated by the tilt of the Vive controller, the movement is unnecessarily sensitive, causing the vehicle to move erratically due to its 6-axis system. Using a gamepad or keyboard in this case is far more intuitive and stable. Thankfully, there is an autopilot feature, which means you can enjoy the view instead of wrestling with the controls. Then, whenever you exit the vehicle, you’re given a brief ‘pressurisation’ animation of your character climbing into their suit. It’s jarring, as it feels like an out-of-body experience, particularly as every other transition is a simple fade to black.
Much like Steve Wozniak’s demo, I also experienced dizziness, as the vehicle movement is unusual (the unfamiliar martian gravity is probably a factor too) and the on-foot locomotion is smooth, including rotation—a common cause of nausea. The opening tutorial suggests there is now a ‘comfort mode’, but exactly what that entails is unclear, as enabling or disabling the function had no obvious effect.
Image courtesy FMG Labs
However, there is a permanent ‘teleport’ function that appears active whether you want it or not, so perhaps this is a bug. What it desperately needs (for those sensitive to smooth locomotion in VR) is a snap turning option, which is presumably what the comfort mode is supposed to enable. The teleport feels rather overpowered, as it allows the user to fly across the landscape at breakneck speed, much faster than the rover can travel. As a result, the temptation is there to mash the button and ‘cheat’ your way across the terrain rather than enjoying the journey.
The team behind Daydream, Google’s mobile VR platform, is currently conducting experiments with the aim of broadening virtual reality’s usecase to include more interactive learning. With an experimental VR espresso maker at the ready, the team says “people learned faster and better in VR” than by watching training videos when put to the test on how to brew the real thing.
Divided into two groups; one having access to YouTube videos and the other a VR training prototype featuring a 3D model of an espresso machine—replete with buttons, turn-able knobs and steam wand for frothing milk—the team gave everyone as much time as they wanted to go over the steps on how to make espresso.
image courtesy Google
The Daydream team then put the would-be baristas to task with a real espresso machine. At the end, they gave people a detailed report on how they’d done, including an analysis of the quality of their coffee. According to the experiment, participants in the YouTube tutorial group normally went through the physical task three times, while participants using the VR training method normally went through twice before obtaining a passing result.
“We were excited to find out that people learned faster and better in VR,” says Google Software Engineer Ian MacGillivray in a blogpost. “Both the number of mistakes made and the time to complete an espresso were significantly lower for those trained in VR (although, in fairness, our tasting panel wasn’t terribly impressed with the espressos made by either group!) It’s impossible to tell from one experiment, of course, but these early results are promising.”
Admittedly, the test wasn’t perfect. MacGillivray says espresso wasn’t a great choice to begin with, as the physical sensation of tamping, or getting the right density of coffee grounds in the metal portafilter, “simply can’t be replicated with a haptic buzz.”
People also don’t listen to instructions or warnings. Voice overs, written instructions, hints, tutorials on how to use the controller—all of it fell to the wayside when popping a VR-newcomer into the headset. “No matter what warning we flashed if someone virtually touched a hot steam nozzle, they frequently got too close to it in the real world, and we needed a chaperone at the ready to grab their hand away.”
The team says that VR platforms aren’t quite ready when it comes to acquiring certain types of skills either, and contends that the addition of VR gloves with better tracking and haptics would be necessary before the medium can get outside the ‘moving things and pressing buttons’ phase it’s in currently. There’s also the difficulty of giving users the freedom of choice, as every choice the Daydream team allowed the user to make, only created an exponential growth in the number of paths through the tutorial. “In the end, it was much easier to model the trainer like a video game, where every object has its own state. So instead of the trainer keeping track of all the steps the user did in order (“user has added milk to cup”), we had it track whether a key step had been achieved (“cup contains milk”),” says MacGillivray.
The team considers the VR espresso training prototype a success, saying at very least that VR is a more useful way to introduce people to a new skill, one that can easily be revisited in VR once context is established in the physical world.
The BBC’s newest VR documentary, Easter Rising: Voice of a Rebel, today launched on Gear VR and Oculus Rift. The 13-minute documentary takes you through one man’s memories on a journey back to a defining moment in Irish history, the armed insurrection against British rule during Easter Week, April 1916 that saw the execution of fifteen Irish leaders and internment of more than a thousand people—kindling for the nascent Irish sentiment of self-rule which later manifested in 1922 with the founding of the Irish Free State.
Easter Rising: Voice of a Rebel is now available for free on the Oculus Store for both Oculus Rift and Gear VR.
Created by BBC iWonder, Crossover Labs and VRTOV, the story follows audio from Willie McNeive, taken from a 1970s tape recording. With the voice of McNeive as your guide, a participant in the Easter Rising nearly 60 years beforehand, you’re transported back to the streets of 1916 Dublin to see the uprising against the British. McNeive was only 19 years old at the time.
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image courtesy BBC
image courtesy BBC
image courtesy BBC
According to the developers, each scene in the 13-minute story has a fixed point of view, but the viewer can look around in the full 360-degree environment and see the action while listening to recollections of the events in various locations.
The BBC bills it as “an artistic journey into the memory of an ordinary man who was swept up into an extraordinary event.”
Zillah Watson, Head of Commissioning, Virtual Reality, says: “Easter Rising: Voice of a Rebel is a fascinating account of a critical moment in Ireland’s history, told from a unique perspective. It shows that virtual reality can be used to give audiences a greater sense of presence, enabling them to better understand a range of issues like important current affairs, news, science and history.”
Oculus has announced a pilot program to place 100 Rifts and Oculus Ready PCs in 90 libraries throughout the state of California, from the Oregon border down to Mexico. Detailed on the Oculus Blog, the new partnership with the California State Library hopes to highlight the educational potential of VR, as well as provide easy access to VR hardware within the heart of local communities.
“Public libraries provide safe, supportive environments that are available and welcoming to everyone,” says Oculus Education Program Manager Cindy Ball. “They help level the playing field by providing educational opportunities and access to technology that may not be readily available in the community households. Libraries share the love—at scale.”
Using VR for education can be transformative, with the potential to revolutionise the way we teach and learn, but it is still in its early stages, with the prohibitive cost of hardware being a major hurdle for many schools. While Cardboard-based education projects are popular, its capabilities are limited; getting Rift and Touch into libraries is a positive step towards increasing public access and awareness of high-end VR hardware and software. The beauty of this particular pilot program, Oculus says, is that anyone—regardless of class, race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or physical ability—can get their hands on a library card.
“It’s pretty cool to imagine how many people will try VR for the very first time—and have that ‘wow’ moment—in their local libraries,” says Ball. “We hope early access will cause many people to feel excited and empowered to move beyond VR consumption and to ask how they can become creators and innovators.”
While there is a strong distribution of participating libraries from north to south—with the 90 participating locations spanning nearly half of the state’s 184 library jurisdictions—the hope is that the California State Library can fund further expansion beyond the pilot program, which covers less than 10% of California’s more than 1,100 library branches. Discussions are underway with Washington state to potentially launch a similar program in its libraries, and the hope is that momentum continues to build, Oculus says.
Though their consumer-facing VR operations have been largely focused in the gaming and entertainment sectors, Oculus’ vision for VR has always stretched further, and their recent focus on social VR and bringing the web into VR has clear implications for education.
“Games have been, and will continue to be, a primary market driver for VR,” notes Ball. “By highlighting the educational potential of VR in libraries, Oculus and Facebook are sending a message that games are not our sole focus.”
Google’s overarching mission is to organize all of the world’s information, and so it’s a natural fit for the company to be one of the leading innovators for using VR for immersive education. Google Expeditions was born out of a hackathon soon after the Google Carboard launched back at Google I/O 2014, and it’s since been shared with over 2 million students who have gone on virtual field trips. At I/O last week, the company had Tango demos that showed me just how compelling augmented reality is going to be in the future of collaborative & embodied educational experiences.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
I had a chance to catch up with Daydream’s Education Program Manager, Jennifer Holland, at Google I/O where we talked about the history of Expeditions, and how successful it’s been in creating new levels of immersion and engagement with students. She talks about how the Expedition experiences are designed to be agnostic to any specific age or subject matter, but also independent of specific teaching strategy or philosophy.
Google has been rapidly iterating on creating useful tools that are immediately useful for teachers to introduce immersive experiences into their lesson plan, and there’s a lot that is left up to the teacher to be able to guide and direct the interactions and group learning exercises.
Holland also talks about some of the tools that have been built into expeditions, as well as the feedback that is driving the future of immersive education towards shared augmented reality experiences with Tango-enabled devices.
One of Google’s biggest strengths in the VR community is cultivating mental presence by using open web technologies to fuse together information about our world so that we can experience it in a new way. Google Earth VR is a perfect example of fusing many different sources of data about our world, and providing an entirely new immersive experience of it in VR.
Right now, Google’s Expeditions team and their collaborators are the only ones who are creating educational experiences, but they’d like to eventually make it easier at some point for people to create their own Expeditions. The Google Expeditions team announced during their Google I/O session that they’ve been using Mozilla’s WebVR framework, A-Frame, in order to rapidly prototype Expeditions experiences in VR, and Unity to prototype experiences in AR.
I expect that WebVR and WebAR technologies will be a critical part of Google’s VR & AR strategies, as they’re helping to drive the standardization process with the work of WebVR primary spec author Brandon Jones. AR has the advantage over VR that the students faces aren’t occluded, and so there is a bit more collaborative learning and interaction between students, which you can see from this video of Expeditions AR:
My direct experience of seeing the Tango AR experiences at Google I/O is that the 6DoF inside out tracking is so good that it’s possible to feel a sense of virtual embodiment as you walk around virtual objects locked in space. I haven’t been able to experience this level of quality tracking in phone-based AR before, and so it was really surprising to feel how immersive it was. You’re able to completely walk around virtual objects, which triggers a deeper level of embodied cognition in being able to interact and make sense of the world by moving your body.
Embodied Cognition is the idea that we don’t just think with our minds, but that we use our entire bodies and environments to process information. I feel that the world-locking capabilities of the Tango-enable phones start to unlock the unique affordances of embodied cognition that usually comes with 6DoF positional tracking, and it was a lot more compelling that I was expecting it to be. But after seeing the Tango demos, I feel confident in saying that AR is going to be a huge part of the future of education.
The Google Cardboard or Daydream hasn’t generated a lot of excitement from the larger VR community as they’re seen as the gateway immersive experiences to have higher-end, PC-driven experiences. But Google’s ethic of rapidly iterating and creating a minimum viable products that are highly scalable has given them over two years of direct experiences of innovating with immersive education. They’ve been able to reach over 2 million students, and they’ve also been doing a number of research pilot studies with these VR expeditions. Google researchers Matthew Kam and Jinghua Zhang presented some of their preliminary research at the IEEE VR Embodied Learning Workshop in March, and you see some of the highlights in this Twitter thread, including work that’s happening to create an immersive education primer for Circle Center.
I’m really excited to see how Google continues to innovate with immersive education, and you can look forward to seeing a solo version of Expeditions on Daydream that will be released soon that features guided tours, history lessons, and science explainers. What Google is finding is that Expeditions is not just for students, but also adults for casual and continuing education, enterprises for training applications, and even Major League Baseball have started to explore how to use immersive education experiences to engage audiences in a new way. At the end of the day, Google is showing that if you want to expand your mind and learn about the world, then Daydream & Expeditions are going to have some killer apps for you.
For more information on embodied cognition, then be sure to check these previous interviews:
Schell Games have released a trailer for their latest project SuperChem VR, an incredibly fun looking way to teach chemistry and perhaps a glimpse into the potential future for VR in education.
We’ve seen a lot of application attempt to capture some of the potential VR enthusiasts of immersive computing know VR can deliver. But Jessie Schell’s studio, responsible for the ingenious Bond-esque VR puzzle title I Expect You to Die, seem to really be onto something with their latest title SuperChem, and I think it may be one to watch.
SuperChem’s concept is simple; Utilise the immersive properties of virtual reality to provide students with both a safe and fun environment in which to learn about chemistry. Doing this in VR means there’s no danger of harm from caustic or corrosive chemicals, no risk or accidental fire damage and, perhaps most importantly, you can give the user access to infinite resources and ensure maximum engagement by designing the setting to be fun and to encourage curiosity.
“Teachers report that learning about chemicals, lab equipment and how to use the equipment correctly can be a slow process,” says Jessie Schell, CEO of Schell Games, “So SuperChem VR is designed to allow you to learn about these concepts in a safe, interactive and immersive way.”
The application as it stands puts the user in a futuristic space laboratory, surrounded by chemical dispensers, but also very un-futuristic, very familiar conical flasks and measurement cylinders. You can access different chemicals which are virtually synthesised on command and then mix any of them using the same physical actions you’d perform in real life. You can mad scientist your heart out, analysing the results as you go and, should you get stuck, there’s a friendly assistant to guide and prompt you in the right direction and to set you individual tasks and experiments to carry out. “This combination of an immersive and engaging environment with scaffolding for exploring chemistry allows you to have fun while learning,” says Schell.
The project was created with support from the Institution of Education Sciences (part of the U.S. Department of Education) along with the Small Business Innovation Research although it’s not clear if or how it’ll be rolled out for actual use in educational institutions. From my perspective however, the format seems like a winner and for someone like me who really struggled grappling with some aspects of science at school, despite having a keen interest, I think something like SuperChem VR would have been a real help in earning my engagement.
What do you think of SuperChem VR‘s concept and its practical uses for programs like it in education today and in the future?
Education is widely expected to be an area where AR and VR will see major play, but we can’t start at zero and immediately arrive at a world of immersive, transformed education. It takes stepping stones. MyLab is one such stepping stone, which, using Microsoft’s HoloLens headset’ offers up a touchless, interactive periodic table for chemistry students.
For many, hands-on learning is the best way to learn. But you can’t quite go hands-on with particles much smaller than the naked eye can see, nor with their invisible interactions. That’s the heart of chemistry, the tiny interactions and invisible characteristics of elements that make them behave vastly differently. As such, chemistry at the basic level is often taught in concept from books, while simple experiments usually look at the results of chemical interactions in lieu of being able to actually observe the interactions themselves.
Augmented reality app MyLab aims to make a connection between the textbook concepts and the observational experiments by offering an interactive periodic table which also visualizes the hidden structures of the elements. The app’s creator, Lucas Rizzotto, explains how it works in the video heading this article. MyLab can be downloaded for free on HoloLens via the Microsoft Store.
Now, this isn’t something that couldn’t, for the most part, be achieved on an iPad—except for one thing: the ability to interact with the app and its data without touching it. Thanks to HoloLens’ floating AR interface and gesture-based interactions, a student in the lab wearing gloves who might be handling dangerous chemicals can position the interface floating anywhere in view and interact with the data without needing to be wary of contaminating a devices like an iPad or computer.
This is indeed a pretty cool app, but more importantly, it’s a stepping stone for bringing AR into the classroom in a more significant way. Deeper AR integration in classrooms can be imagined easily—perhaps the teacher is able to annotate parts of the student’s periodic table or even guide them through the experiment remotely in real-time—but to reach real, practical integration takes a series of smaller steps to figure out the best way to design such apps that are productive and valuable, and not just novel. There’s a world of possibilities when it comes to AR; MyLab makes a small but real step in that direction.
Google’s overarching mission is to organize all of the world’s information, and so it’s a natural fit for the company to be one of the leading innovators for using VR for immersive education. 
