Serendipity35

Virtual reality, like rock n’ roll, is not something that can be described well. It must be experienced in order to be fully appreciated and understood.

Interestingly, it has been catching on among educators.

Since 2013, Emory Craig, Director of eLearning at the College of New Rochelle, and Maya Georgieva, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Digital Bodies, have been presenting workshops on the topic. They’re working with developers, researchers and educators who are embracing the immersive learning technology, which seems to be on the cusp of widespread use...as well as being on the receiving end of a lot of hype.

Around the time Craig and Georgieva began exploring this emergent medium, the arrival of Google Glass seemed to have ushered in greater popularity. Georgieva was one of the educators to experiment with Google Glass. People suddenly had a wearable ideal of what could be tapped to create an augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR). The much-heralded yet now all-but-defunct product left its mark, as several key technological developments have sprung up to satisfy a new market.

One key development also came from the Internet giant: Google Cardboard. An accessible solution that was ‘easy to get into the hands of educators,’ Georgieva noted, it has helped to generate interest in the use of VR in the learning environment. With only a smartphone app and the inexpensive piece of cardboard, students can be transported to other worlds...

continue reading... "Outside the Boundaries: Exploring Virtual and Augmented Reality in Learning" by Kristi DePaul

Pokémon Go was big last summer, but it was a flash in the tech pan. It couldn't scale. But it was a big augmented reality (AR) game that was mobile and required no additional hardware - especially the odd-looking goggles we currently associate with virtual reality. The game was platform agnostic. It used location services to geo-locate players with a virtual world. It worked.

I never played Pokémon Go, but I did observe others playing. For those of you who also didn't participate, here's what it is all about.

Your avatar is displayed on a map using the player's current geographical location. There are PokéStops that provide players with items, such as eggs, Poké Balls, berries, potions and lure modules which attract additional wild, and sometimes rare, Pokémon. These stops and battle locations (gyms) are re-purposed portals from Ingress, developer Niantic's previous augmented reality game. 

In AR mode the game uses the camera and gyroscope on the player's mobile device to display an image of a Pokémon as though it were in the real world.



I can certainly see more game applications for AR. I would pursue the rights to the Harry Potter world's latest franchise whose name itself suggests an AR game: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.  

But is this all we can expect from augmented reality? 

Its use in education has been limited, but it has been used to superimpose text, graphics, video and audio into a student’s real time environment. As a kind of supercharged QR code, in textbooks and in real spaces, such as museums and physical displays, material can be embedded using “markers” that trigger when scanned by an AR device and supply supplementary multimedia materials.



Using AR for more serious purposes is not that new. In 2000, NASA's X38 display (shown here) had a video map with overlays including runways and obstacles for use during flight tests. 

The applications for AR are numerous. For architects and builders, AR can aid in visualizing building projects. Computer-generated images of a structure can be superimposed into a real life local view of a property before the physical building is constructed there. It can be used before any construction begins while architects are rendering into their view animated 3D visualizations of their 2D drawings. 

Similarly, AR allows industrial designers to experience a product's design and operation before completion. Volkswagen used AR for comparing calculated and actual crash test imagery and to visualize and modify car body structure and engine layout. AR was also be used to compare digital mock-ups with physical mock-ups for finding discrepancies between them.



We are not there yet, but in education AR should become more common and more interactive. Computer-generated simulations of existing places and historical events. In higher education, applications such as Construct3D, are used to help learn mechanical engineering concepts, math or geometry. 

Primary school children using interactive AR experiences will probably end up in high schools and colleges using AR and VR in ways we can't quite imagine today. AR technology in the classroom will be integrated, rather than a novelty, and mixing real life and virtual elements will feel more natural. 

"Google wants the artificial-intelligence software that drives the company’s Internet searches to become the standard platform for computer-science scholars in their own experiments.

On Monday, Google announced it would turn its machine-learning software, called TensorFlow, into open-source code, so anyone can use it.

“We hope this will let the machine-learning community — everyone from academic researchers, to engineers, to hobbyists — exchange ideas much more quickly, through working code rather than just research papers,” Google announced on its website.

Until now, researchers have had access to similar open-source software: Torch, built by researchers at New York University, as well as Caffe and Theano, are also open to everyone. TensorFlow is meant to combine the best of the three, Jeff Dean, a top engineer at Google, told Wired."

via http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/

Image: Google Cardboard via Wikimedia Commons
Remember when Google Cardboard was shown at last year's at I/O?  This cheap virtual reality (VR) device made of cardboard and rubber bands turned out to be the big buzz for many people. Sure, it wasn't the fancy Google Glass, but it was Google.
It has been a year and is anyone really talking about Glass anymore? The official website is a dead end.  Google Glass is wearable technology with an optical head-mounted display (OHMD). The idea was to experiment with a mass-market ubiquitous computer. It has information in a smartphone-like hands-free format and a wearer can interact with the Internet via natural language voice commands.

Google Glass sold for $1,500. In January 2015, Google announced that it would stop producing the Google Glass prototype but remained committed to the development of the product.

Cardboard, on the other extreme, is decidedly low-tech. It is cardboard, with lenses, a few patches of padding and Velcro, and a rubber band to keep it from sliding around. The expensive part is that you need to add your phone.


You download the Cardboard app from Google Play or Apple's App Store. There are a number of versions of Cardboard that you can buy now.

It is not meant to be Google Glass. It is closer to using Oculus Rift or Samsung's Gear VR.
You hold Cardboard up to your face like the old toy View-Master I had as a kid. Now, that old toy is coming back with some help from Google as part of Google's goal to expand Cardboard's use.

Though the term "virtual reality" has been around since 1938, the use of it to mean an artificial reality in a technological way is from the 1970s. One should not confuse virtual reality with augmented reality. VR and AR are similar in immersing the user, but AR users continue to be in touch with the real world while interacting with virtual objects around them. VR takes you out of the real world and immerses you in another world. Sometimes that immersion is so immersive that users get dizzy or nauseous, especially with software that emphasizes motion like the early days of wide screen cinema and 3D films.

The DIY nature of Cardboard is appealing and with a phone and an investment of $20 or $30, you can give a VR headset a try.