ELI, Day One, Part One

Sticky note table top

The Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) is meeting this week in New Orleans, and we have two teams from Auburn University presenting about various aspects of learning at the conference.

I am here to see what I can learn about virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, and just reality in general.  My Monday morning workshop focused on . VR and AR: Driving Pedagogical Innovation through Vision and Strategy, giving us plenty of food for thought with examples of existing various realities, suggestions on gear, and worksheets to tackle strategic and implementation challenges.
The two presenters, Maya Georgieva and Emory Craig, have been working for years in this field and written a number of Educause pieces discussing various aspects of virtual and augmented reality.

Here some pointers on these different aspects if you have not thought too much about this yet:
1. 360 degree video is probably the easiest to accomplish, filming an existing location in a full 360 degree circle to create a somewhat immersive experience. All you need is a 360 degree camera, a sense of what kind of space makes sense to be captured this way, and some experience in post-production, eg editing, stitching the video together. Panopto now allows for 360 degree video uploads.
Yosemite video is one example of a 360 degree video - note the instructions under the video for best user experience and that you can drag the video inside its window to see different perspectives.

2.  Augmented reality allows for an overlay or embedding of virtual or graphic elements into a real video environment.  Think Pokemon Go as the most obvious popular example. Both Apple and Google have been developing engines that allow for the design of such augmented realities.  Apple's ARKit and Google's ARCore allow all of us to create our own realities to some extent.
ARKit Examples
ARCore Examples

3.  Virtual Reality is the full immersion into a completely design virtual environment.  This tends to be the most complex environment to design, especially as we have been already exposed to very expensive versions of virtual reality, making it potentially difficult to compete with our previous experiences in the gaming world.


Why would this be of interest to us in education? Consider that each of these can do one of the following:
 - Take your students to places they would otherwise not be able to go to because it is too expensive, to time intensive, or too dangerous.
 - Allow your students to interact with an environment that in the real world would be too expensive or dangerous to work in, like a lab, power plant or other workplace experience.
-- Allow your students to learn from their mistakes in this environment before they encounter stressful situations in the real world.
 -- allow your students to be agents in making decisions in this kind of environment
 --  Allow your students an active part in creating such environments, with all the situational factors that need to be considered when creating aa compelling learning situation.

The technology may still be in its toddlerdom (I think we are past infancy), and with the emerging artificial intelligence capabilities, we will be able to give more choices to the users of such situations.

Here some examples of what is already out there, many of the cross-university collaborations with a lot of student input:
Virtually Ulysses - James Joyce's Dublin to bring a complex piece of literature to life and make it potentially easier to understand
1772 Gaspee Affair -- historical event reinvisioned
Visualizing the impossible - architecture students create physically impossible constructions
L.A. Children's Hospital Trauma Training - medical students are immersed into chaotic ER situations to deal with the entire situation not just the immediate medical crisis
Berlin Wall - students play different roles in a very emotional historical situation, allowing for the creation of empathy for different participants
Oregon 3d virtual microscope - moving into the molecular level

and yes, the furniture was also cool with a table top consisting of sticky notes.