Tag Archives: Virtual Reality (VR)

Virtual Reality, Learning and Experience Seminar

Experience Lab and Centre for Virtual Learning Technologies together have organised a seminar on Virtual Reality, Learning and Experience. 120 participants will hear 7 state of the art presentations and engage hands-and headsets- on with some amazing examples of how VR is used across education, industry, culture and research.

With the seminar, we focus on learning and experience as integral parts of any Virtual Reality- activity. The background for the seminar is that the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science in 2018 awarded Roskilde University a DKK 20 million extraordinary grant for developing virtual learning technologies, more specifically for exploring the use of virtual reality simulations in science education. The seminar aims to open up this research and development to a larger audience.

With the grant, Roskilde University is implementing, developing and researching VR- and 3D-simulations at the Bachelor in Natural Sciences programme within a timeframe from 2018 to 2021. Virtual Reality laboratory simulations are being integrated into undergraduate natural sciences curricula. This ties in with there being a broad political interest in creating and maintaining interest in the natural and technical sciences. Which isn’t easy:  there are substantial problems in persuading young people to choose the science, technology, engineering and math areas of education – and it is equally difficult to retain the students who actually do choose to study natural or technical sciences.

STEM promotion through VR

This attention to STEM is part of the background for the political investment in virtual technologies for learning. The idea is that innovative learning experiences can help create interest in the natural and technical sciences – and help maintain this interest. One of the ideas in marrying STEM education with new information and communication technologies is the belief that such technologies have the capacity to create stimulating learning experiences.

However, there are intriguing experience design challenges to this.

Even though VR hardware, simulations, and content applications become more and more accessible it seems that the users’ VR experience varies considerably. This is due to the varying quality of content, and it is also due to the scattered knowledge of the actual challenges of VR experience in real-world situations and in different fields of application. Designing for good virtual reality experiences involves substantial design complexity.

VR Experience Design Challenges: Embodiment, Sociality and Physical Environment

One obvious and important design issue, of course, is the design of the actual application – the content with which the user engages. This is challenging in itself. To design good content. Add on top of this all of the stuff that goes on beyond the VR headset. From an experience-design research perspective, this means for example addressing the body – what happens to the body in Virtual Reality experiences? And the social situation. What kinds of social situation do virtual reality learning experiences create? Furthermore: What role does the exterior physical infrastructure play?

And in relation to the goal and ambition of using virtual reality in higher education in designs for learning – what role does the organizational infrastructure play? Which demands does teaching through virtual reality place on professors, on students and on the institution in terms of technical setup, maintenance and support?

Transdisciplinary Approaches

With the seminar on Virtual Reality, Learning and Experience, we share and develop knowledge on these important dimensions of experience designs for learning through virtual reality.

The organizing committee consists of researchers and educators from across the natural, technical, human and social sciences – iterating transdisciplinarity – one of the founding principles of Roskilde University and the conviction that ‘no major problems are resolved on the basis of any single academic discipline alone’. It is our contention that the inclusion of multiple perspectives on the subject matter helps steer clear of too simplistic assumptions – for example about how learning emerges or about the relationship between experience and technology.

Organizing committee

Connie Svabo, Performance Design, ExperienceLab

Søren Larsen, Virtual Learning Technologies

Ates Gürsimsek, Designer, ExperienceLab

Eduardo Abrantes, Artistic Researcher, ExperienceLab

John Gallagher, Computer Science, ExperienceLab

Per Meyer Jepsen, Biology, Virtual Learning Technologies

Prajakt Pande, Learning Sciences, Virtual Learning Technologies

Sisse Siggaard Jensen, CommunicationStudies, ExperienceLab

Troels Andreasen, Computer Science, ExperienceLab

Virtual Reality, Learning and Experience Seminar

Virtual Reality, Robotics and Urban Space

Get-together April 11th, 2019

Roskilde University, bldg. 40.0

10.30 – 12.00     Virtual Reality, Learning and Experience – planning of seminar which will take place August 21, 2019 at RUC. Save the date!! This seminar is organized as a collaboration between RUC Center for Virtual Learning and Experience Lab. If you want to hear more and/or to contribute to the seminar, you are welcome to join the organizers at this planning meeting.

12.00 – 13.00     Open and informal lunch where we will talk about virtual reality learning experiences, robotics and design & art-based research. Meet the RUC VR and Natural Science Learning researchers Prajakt Pande and Per Meyer Lassen. Also meet robotics and communications scholar Frauke Zeller– as well as a host of other inspiring and interesting RUC researchers! Please do sign up before April 8th, so we can order an appropriate amount of food. You are welcome.

13.00 – 14.30     Talk on Robotics Mediating Urban Space, with Frauke Zeller, Associate Professor at Ryerson University, followed by a short speculative robotics workshop, facilitated by Frauke Zeller and Susana Tosca, Associate Professor, Roskilde University.

Frauke Zeller has a range of great projects to tell about – among others the hitchbot project which received a lot of attention: http://www.hitchbot.me/

Hope to see you!

Connie Svabo, Søren Larsen, Susana Tosca

 

Photos from our visit to the research lab “Limsi”, Paris

Christian Jacquemin is one of the researchers working at Le Limsi. He arranged our visit to Limsi and set up everything for us to see and experience the cutting-edge Limsi Lab. Christian is working together with Experience Lab and we look forward to his visit to ExLab by the turn of 2012/2013.

Limsi (Laboratoire d’Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l’Ingénieur) is a research laboratory with a personnel of 120 permanent researchers and 60 ph.d students. The Lab covers  a wide disciplinary spectrum and research themes: from thermodynamics to cognition, encompassing fluid mechanics, energetics, acoustics and voice synthesis, spoken language and text processing, vision, virtual reality…

We visited the team working with Augmented and Virtual Reality and Audio Interfaces. Three research projects are undertaken 1) The NAVIG project: This project aims at providing an augmented audio rendering to blind people to help them in their daily life but without preventing them from perceiving their normal audio environment. 2) The SMART-I² is a spatialized audio-visual rendering system of high-quality. This project aims at increasing  intelligibility and immersion sensation in audio-visual interfaces for virtual reality and 3) Audio-visual Renderings for Multimedia Navigation: This axe is looking for ways to increase big database exploration interfaces by adding them 3D sound and by transposing to them metaphors coming from the visualization field.

A 3D holographic audio lab.

A studio aimed at 3D audio and sound design and studies is located In one of the corners of the huge laboratory with a virtual reality space at the centre. Brian Katz is one of the researchers affiliated with this studio and he joined us on our tour around the Lab.

Marc Rébillat showed us around the virtual reality lab.

Marc showed us and he explained the construction of the many facilities of the Lab. In the virtual reality space, he introduced a virtual and visual installation to teach students about relativity theory by showing and experiencing the changes that time and space undergo when traveling by the speed of light.

Relativity theory installation.

 

Virtual humans and emotions.

With a board game we played against a humanoid avatar with feelings – or at least so it seemed. Whenever the avatar was successful his expression gradually changed to show happiness and success awareness and, of course, also the sadness and acidity when the human player appeared successful. Matthieu is the post.doc who introduced his work with this integration of an emotional model and the humanoid avatar.

Finally, in the virtual reality space I sensed what it is like when huge humanoid avatars stare at you wherever you go. It was a scary sensation.

Thanks to Christian, Marc, Michelle, Brian, and Matthieu for a great experience.