New School VR Podcast: Recent Episodes
Pinky Gonzales
The New School VR podcast is a show about learning technologies so powerful, they transcend the limits of reality itself. Imagine atoms the size of your house, or billion-star galaxies at living room scale. To our eyes and ears, these visions are real, and the implications for the future of learning are beyond imagination.
New School VR is a weekly interview-style podcast, helping parents, teachers, instructors, artists and engineers navigate the vast potential of VR and AR-assisted learning.
Peter Campbell is a 20+ year veteran of the educational technology space. From his early work as the Director of Academic Technology at Montclair State University, to his recent role as Director of Strategy, Immersive Learning Solutions for Pearson, “the world’s leading learning company,” Campbell has dedicated his career to computer-assisted learning modalities.
Today, he serves as the founder and CEO of xpereal, an immersive experience consultancy focused on the needs of the education and training industry. In this episode of the New School VR podcast, Peter talks at length about HoloPatient, a holographic app his team at Pearson, in partnership with San Diego State University, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, and Microsoft, created for nursing education.
Based on Microsoft’s HoloLens technology, the system helps aspiring medical professionals diagnose and treat treat illnesses with holographic, live-action, virtual patients acting out various symptoms and conditions.
Peter has also provided some excellent additional videos and reading materials for those interested in further exploring the use of virtual training and simulation technologies in the medical profession and beyond, available at http://NewSchoolvr.com
This week's show is based on a couple of presentations I had the opportunity to give in Portland, OR over the past two weeks. In lieu of having a guest on the show for this episode, I thought I'd just combine the two, and throw in some extra visual aids. This is a "101" level overview of VR, AR and 360 technologies that I and many others have found useful. For complete show notes and links to every app, camera and HMD mentioned, visit http://newschoolvr.com
Unimersiv was one of the first, and has become among the most widely used educational VR apps for classroom and personal use. Currently available for both Samsung Gear VR and Oculus Rift headsets, Unimersiv offers a combination of custom-produced and curated educational experiences covering topics as diverse as space travel, history, archeology and human anatomy, with many new experiences currently in development. Live from Paris, France, Unimersiv founder, Baptiste Greve, joins us in this episode to discuss the company's origins, current offerings and future plans.
Jaime Donally has been using VR and AR technologies in the classroom for years, and has helped thousands of learning professionals do the same as a global speaker and one of the foremost experts on the subject. In this podcast, Jaime covers over a dozen current (and former) VR and AR applications every teacher should know about.
Lifeliqe (pronounced "lifelike") is an edtech startup with an enviable advantage in the VR learning space. Spun out of a sister company called Corinth, Lifeliqe hit the ground running with literally thousands of interactive 3D models for parents, teachers and students to put to use in both augmented and virtual reality environments. Beginning with an iPad app that makes use of a familiar "Pokemon effect," combining virtual images with a real-time camera display to produce "mash-ups" or mixed reality experiences, Lifeliqe first caught the attention of the academic world as a means to make scientifically accurate models more fun and accessible throughout the learning process. As VR technologies hit the mass market in 2016, the company was perfectly positioned to introduce these 3D objects into fully interactive virtual experiences, which quickly drew interest from HTC Vive, and a formal educational partnership was born. Calling in live from the Czech Republic, I had the privilege of interviewing Martin Buka?c?ek, "Community Shaman" at both Corinth and Lifeliqe. Of particular note is the discussion toward the end of the interview about "the five E's of learning," and how they're applied in virtual learning experiences.
Based in Munich, Germany, Delightex is blazing a global trail for the use of VR in modern classrooms. CoSpaces, their free and intuitive VR creation tool, allows teachers and students alike to create VR scenes and experiences using nothing more than a standard web browser and a Google Cardboard-style viewer. Susanne Krause, Public Relations Manager at Delightex, is our guest on this show, wherein we learn how teachers are using the CoSpaces VR platform to reinforce lesson plans on a wide range of subjects, how students are using it for virtual exhibitions and presentations, and even how parents can use CoSpaces for storytelling and more.
Subscribe to the New School VR podcast at http://newschoolvr.com Matt Witkamp has seen the future of AR-assisted surgery and medical training. In fact his team at Citizen Inc., in partnership with Stanford Medicine and Microsoft, have literally invented it. Project Serra is a Hololens application that allows surgeons to see real 3D MRI visualizations directly a-top of patients on the operating table, helping to more precisely locate and extract life-threatening tumors. In today’s show, we discuss the origins of Project Serra, Citizen’s role in guiding the user experience, and how it’s use in live surgery and training simulations will help to reduce repeat surgeries and improve cosmetic outcomes for breast cancer patients. About Our Guest Matt Witkamp is an Associate Partner and Director of Design Strategy at Citizen, Inc., a design and technology company based in Portland, OR. Witkamp has 20+ years of design and UX experience, and his clients have included AT&T, T-Mobile, HTC, Intel, Telenav, Siemens Medical, and CDK Global, among many others. Blending strategic and design thinking with technical understanding, he works with clients to uncover opportunities and to realize experiences that transcend the screen in an increasingly connected world.
Subscribe to the New School VR Podcast at http://NewSchoolVR.com Dr. Carrie Straub joins us here to discuss the role of real human interaction in virtual reality training simulations. Instructional designers have become adept at crafting training programs for the purpose of transferring repeatable information through LMS and similar e-learning programs, but teaching emotional, interpersonal skills (“EQ) for career-specific applications is a profoundly greater challenge. Imagine a world where pilots “learned to fly by reading textbooks and passing exams without ever sitting in a cockpit. Would you trust the lives of your children on their debut voyage in the skies? Though perhaps an extreme example of the difference between technical understanding and real-world experience, virtual simulations are so powerful because they can emulate real-life scenarios in an otherwise safe environment. So it’s no surprise that “live action and virtual simulations have been deployed in flight training programs for decades, let alone emergency response and many other high-stakes occupations. Engaging a classroom full of children however, is akin to flying dozens of planes at once. Each with their own headwinds, performance characteristics and fuel tank capacities to consider. And the same is true of many professions, from working the front desk at a large hotel to selling a group of C-level executives on a new platform, program or service. In a word, some things cannot be taught by computers alone, even in the age of virtual and augment reality assisted training programs. Enter Mursion, a company that blends live human interaction with virtual characters in simulated professional environments, enhanced with a dash of artificial intelligence. Based on research spearheaded by the University of Central Florida and funded in large part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Mursion is the commercialized manifestation of over a decade of research in the field of human-assisted virtual training, and the results they’re now seeing are astounding. In today’s show, you’ll hear Dr. Carrie Straub discuss the results of a 6 month program involving 15,000+ employees at 2,200 locations of an internationally recognized hotel chain, and learn how impactful just 10 minutes of training with each, produced the biggest jump in Net Promoter Scores ever seen by the corporation.
Nathanael Andreini is a globally-minded artist, educator and founding director of Open Space Performing Arts (OSPA), an experiential arts program that facilitates social and emotional intelligence, cross-cultural skills, and team building workshops around the world. Profoundly impacted by the cultural response in Japan to the Fukushima earthquake while working there as an English teacher in 2011, Andreini has dedicated his career to healing and strengthening communities through the arts and education. Though not a "VR industry professional," Andreini's work illustrates the form and function of empathy itself in the modern world. And because empathy is so widely believed to be one of the great emotional outcomes of virtual and augmented learning experiences, I simply could not pass on the opportunity to speak with our guest about the topic. In this show, we learn about his early influences, growing up in a multi-cultural neighborhood in San Mateo, CA, the circuitous career path that led him through France, Japan, Slovenia and coast-to-coast in the United States, and what specific exercises he and his team have employed to help people both express themselves and better understand each other in the real world.
Paul Reynolds has pioneered advanced technologies for the internet, mobile devices and both virtual and augmented realities for more than two decades, and for some of the most lauded tech companies in the world, including Atari, Electronic Arts, and Magic Leap. In episode 2 of the New School VR Podcast, we sit down with Paul to discuss the educational experiences he developed for the Monterey Bay Aquarium, what he’s up to with his new company, Vertex Labs 3D, and why he made the 3,000 mile move from Dania Beach, FL to Portland, OR in the summer of 2016. (Spoiler: Because Portland is the jam.) We also discuss the tools currently available to both technical and non-technical educators. Of particular note was the conversation around one student’s use of Tilt Brush, a VR painting app, to work through calculus equations with an instructor. The video can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=froQGXZ-NcE. In just one example of many to come, we find people using creative resources intended for one kind of activity (painting) for something seemingly unrelated (math). These explorations and discoveries are exactly the kind of “aha! moments that will lead to a whole new generation of tools and interactive environments unique to virtual and augmented reality-based learning experiences.
“Stoke Their Wonder, a notable quote from seasoned educator, Chief Innovation Officer and Associate Professor at Concordia University, Shawn Daley. The New School VR podcast sprang to life after a conversation between Daley and show creator, Pinky Gonzales, in October of 2016, so it’s an honor to feature him as the show’s first guest, and to announce Concordia University as an official sponsor. Daley is leading the charge to unify parents, teachers and the technology community at large to better engage students and collectively work to explore the potential of virtual and augmented reality experiences in the classroom and beyond. Topics of this show include the use of AR to teach history lessons on-location, tools that are available to non-technical educators, integrating VR & AR into the classroom with a STEAM mindset (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics), and the power of empathy in the learning process.