 So I'm glad you could join us this afternoon. I'm Cliff Lynch. I am the director of the Coalition for Network Information and I will be briefly introducing the session. This session is one of the synchronous breakouts that are a part of the spring 2021 CNI virtual member meeting we spent yesterday and today doing these synchronous project briefings and we'll have three more of them this week at 4 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. I do wanna note that for this spring meeting we are relying much more heavily than in the past on prerecorded sessions that are available on demand to compliment the synchronous sessions and on Monday we released quite a number of those prerecorded sessions. You can access those through SCED and I think you'll find some rather interesting things in there. Next week we will be doing on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday a few plenary day presentations which will conclude the spring virtual meeting. I do wanna note that this session is being recorded and the recording along with all the other recordings will be publicly available at the conclusion of the spring virtual member meeting. A few mechanics, there is a chat box please feel free to use that to make comments, introduce yourself, whatever you like. There's also a Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen. You can use that to tee up questions at any time during the presentations. After we're finished with the presentations Diane Goldenberg Hart from CNI will help to moderate a Q&A session and we'll answer as many of those as we can. We also have the capability if people raise their hands during the Q&A session to enable them to ask questions by voice if it's something a bit more involved. There is a closed captioning tool available if you want to avail yourself of that. And I think those are all the things I wanted to say about mechanics. So let me move on and introduce this session. So we have two speakers, Elisandro Cavada and Bill Mishow, both from the University of Illinois Champaign Urbana. I think Bill in particular is well-known to the CNI community. He's been an active contributor for many years and done a lot of really interesting things. The topic today is a platform and a project called Project Komodo which the library at Champaign Urbana has been rolling out to try and really start seeing the adoption of VR at some scale. VR is one of these technologies that's fascinated people for 20 years but has been astoundingly resistant to really rolling out at scale at most of our institutions and has long suffered from what I'd call challenges of infrastructure of various kinds. So I'm gonna be very interested to hear the experiences and the strategy of the UIUC library in that regard. And with that, let me just thank our speakers for taking the time to share this with us and I'll turn it over to Elisandro to lead off the presentation and I will disappear. Over to you. Thank you, Cliff. Thank you, everybody. I feel the opportunity to talk with you today about Project Komodo. I apologize for not having my camera on but I was experiencing some latency issues. I wanna make sure that nothing disrupts the flow of the presentation today. So as Cliff, thank you for the introduction, Cliff. So as mentioned, we're gonna be talking about Project Komodo which is here's our catchphrase here is catalyzing browser-based virtual reality teaching and learning in the library. So this product came out of trying to overcome many of the challenges that Cliff mentioned and many we will be discussing today. So quick introductions. My name is Elisandro Cavada. You please call me Alex. I am currently in a room head of the Mathematics Library here at Illinois. I'm medical and bioengineering librarian. Faculty in the Granger Engineering Library and Carl Illinois College of Medicine and I'm involved with a number of technology committees, spaces and services in the library but also across the across campus. And then my colleague, Bill, do you wanna introduce yourself? Hi everybody, looking at the attendees there's a lot of people we know. I'm Bill Mischo the head of the Granger Engineering Library. I also hold the Burt's Old Family Professorship right now at Meritus in Information Access and Delivery. Right Alex? Thanks Bill. So there are three really important individuals who are not here today but they are our Komodo team. So they are the ones who did all of the hard coding and they were the tremendous value I cannot understate their contributions. So that would be Robert Wallace there on the left. He is the operations manager in the idea lab and also the Komodo team lead. And next to him is Brandon Dang. He is the Komodo project manager. So he does a lot of the wrangling of students and also liaison with faculty in developing the main modules which we'll be talking about today. And then David Tamayo who is our Komodo Unity Developer and a PhD student in education. Your VR is very much part of his PhD work. So Project Komodo is an application that came out of a grant internal a funded grant here at Illinois. A little over a year ago before the pandemic it was about approximately 70,000 that was set aside a part of a larger grant to develop this application. We'll talk a little bit about why we decided to build this. So these is kind of an ecosystem of what Project Komodo is. It's an immersive teaching and learning platform. It utilizes what we call domain modules. Another way to look at this is subject modules. So those are modules that have content that's specific to a certain discipline a certain subject area, a certain lesson. The Komodo has a core development team which I just showed in the slide before but the way we intend to support this platform to scale it up moving forward is to do what we're calling crowdsource development. So working with development partners to build onto Komodo. We'll talk about that in a bit. Komodo is accessible from the web portal. As a result, it's of course, it's browser based. It has a lot of functionality for social VR allowing for multiple users in the same environments and being able to engage with each other in multiple and multimodal ways. Other accessibility is important to us because we wanna make sure we're not creating more barriers to virtual reality. We wanna break those barriers and be very mindful of them. And then lastly, we are incorporating some data capture elements so that to allow for some type of evaluation and assessment of the students' performance within the VR experience. Not so much to grade them on their contributions or how they have engaged but to provide the instructor with feedback as to how engage with students with their content while they were in VR. We think that would be, that's gonna be incredibly valuable to instructors. So we've learned in the last year that there's been some lessons to learn from remote learning during the pandemic. So VR or immersive teaching and learning platforms kind of have helped meet some of the issues that tools like Zoom as we're experiencing now have created. And by that I mean, we need more multimodal tools for teaching and learning. So we need something that goes beyond Zoom, beyond kind of the Brady bunch of panels on the screen that are not very engaging, they're not very immersive. You don't, you feel kind of separate siloed and isolated from everybody even if there's 30 or 50 people in the same Zoom session as you. We believe that immersive teaching and learning platforms at Komodo can provide that additional, additional layer of infactionality for engagement with your peers. Unfortunately, most of your apps that are developed right now are being developed for the gaming market. That's not a surprise. That's kind of where the technology got started in many ways or at least became popular in the last five years, it's a tremendous market right now. There are VR apps being developed for education purposes, but those that do exist are very limited and they're for very specific use cases. So if you have a use case in mind for your subject area, if you can't find one that fits your very specific needs, you're kind of out of luck. Those VR apps that do exist, they have very limited functionality, even the particularly the free ones, even the paid ones as well I've noticed. And there's almost little to no customizability. So if you want to customize a VR app to your specific subject or lesson needs, there's very few options for that right now in the market. And of course, the last but not least is that a lot of these VR apps, especially the really good ones that can do well for medical education, they have a, they incurred considerable cost. Some of these, some of these for the annual license can be upwards of $60,000 for limited numbers of users. So they're not cheap. And then they also have very restrictive licenses. So if you're trying to scale this up to a whole course to a department and certainly to a college or university, it's very difficult to do so right now with the existing VR apps. And all of this creates barriers for scalability. So the department or college or university wants to support their departments with VR applications. It's really difficult to do it with these commercially available tools and apps right now. So I mentioned the domain modules. This is kind of where Komodo comes into the scene. So right there on the right is the web portal for Komodo. And you have your list of courses and you can create more of them. You can create labs using what we call domain modules. And then I'll have some examples of what we mean for the domain module in a second. But essentially an instructor can create a custom VR experience bringing in their own media. It's available from a web portal. So they can use this browser based web portal to create that VR experience that then other students can join them in at the same time. Like if there's not an existing module media or functionality that meets the needs of an instructor, there's the potential because we control the development of the platform to customize the source code to add additional functionality. So unlike third party platforms where you're kind of, you're at their mercy as to whether they want to for the development of the app with Komodo because we control it and it's kind of crowd source developed. There's a lot more options to customize the functionality and add more. And it does not require a significant programming or coding experience, particularly if you are just using existing content you don't need any coding or programming experience. It's used to GUI to drop in media and add other functionality. There's limited funding and expertise available. So what I mean by that is that of course to develop a custom VR app is quite expensive. As I mentioned, it's to develop the core functionality of Komodo has cost us around $90,000 over a period of a year and a half to two years. So it's not inexpensive. It's also there's limited expertise available even at a university at the scale of Illinois. There's not that many programmers available with that are available. They may already be tied to other projects. They may already be employed. They may not be interested. So there are only so many programmers that are gonna be available to you. And what we find is that multiple projects are kind of competing for the same individuals more and more and more. But with Komodo because a lot of that core functionality that allows for synchronous users and the same VR experience engaging with media that core functionality is already built for you. So if you do get funding, you don't have to use it to build the functionality that every VR experience needs. That's already there and available for you which allows you to then focus on your very subject specific needs. So that image on the right is a screenshot of Komodo from the browser view. And those are 3D designs of dresses that students in a fashion critique course have developed. And then I'll talk about that use case in a second but they were able to focus on incorporating the 3D models of those dresses into the virtual environment. They didn't have to worry about building the environment around them, building the functionality for students to be in the same experience that was already available to them. And of course, they allows them to kind of incorporate subject specific media and functionality. So I believe most of those dresses underwrite were first created until the brush and then exported and imported into the Komodo instance itself. So with this crowd source development model work, is there any interest in VR? Is VR a fad basically is how I'm positing it. So a quick stat here according to status data, the global AR, VR and mixed reality market is forecast to reach 30.7 billion just this year alone. A lot of that was driven by the pandemic and needing things to do at home, but that's pretty tremendous amount. And this forecast to hit up to 300 billion by 2024. So the technologies here this day, there's a lot of money in it. That's usually a major driver to make sure for longevity. For here at Illinois in particular, we had seed grants out of, I mentioned a 70,000 for programming. We also had 88,000 set aside for funding grants. We funded 17 seed grants. And from the applications we got for those, we got over 63 applications. So about 52% of those applications came from faculty. Second largest amount was graduate students, staff, undergrad, other researchers. So we had a lot of varied interests. And then on the right there, you can see that all the majority of the, the three largest contributors for departments were the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Granger College of Engineering and the Geese College of Business. But there's representation from all departments. So it's a very interdisciplinary, there's a very interdisciplinary interest we are right now. Just another view over 40 departments were represented in those 63 applications. So a tremendous interest from all over campus. Journalism, Informatics, Anthropology, Chemistry, College of Media, English, Entomology from, it runs the gamut. We were quite surprised by this. From the users themselves, I do a number of workshops before the pandemic at least, from everyone who participated and when we surveyed them, there was a lot of interest in undergraduate students, a lot from PhD students, which I found a little interesting. I was not expecting that, but a lot of grad students, staff, faculty and some retirees, and when we surveyed them as to why they were at the, what was the goal for them at that workshop is they just wanted to learn about VR and they wanted to have fun. So, which is what kind of what we want to see because as we'll learn in a bit, the library is kind of one of the last Informal Learning environments in academia. So this is really nice to see that they felt like they can come and learn about any technology in the library, which is great because it can be very intimidating. Very one last graph here is just the departments that the participants were from, a lot of them for the College of Engineering because that is the side of campus at our libraries based out of, but again, Geese College of Business, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, so it kind of maps with that other graph we saw although the College of Engineering is over, obviously is a bigger chunk, but as we can see, tons of other colleges and departments were also represented. As I mentioned, the Komodo's are accessible from a portal. So right there you see they're actually in the VR experience. They have the browser loaded in the VR experience and then they just go to the URL and you can interact with Komodo through the browser available in the VR headset. So those are the main modules that I mentioned. What we ask the faculty is that the content that you create is free and open source to the public because again, this is a crowdsource development model. There's an easy to use GUI and it's a one point of access. So if you're a college and you have 30 different VR apps that your departments are using, you don't have to try to manage access points for 30 different experiences. There's just one portal for it and so it makes scalability a lot easier to implement. Because it is browser based, if you look under right there that's for the material science course that I'll talk about in a second, but we're looking at Robert Thayer who's the ideal light manager. He is looking, he's in the VR experience with Brandon who's one of our other developers. But if you were a student who didn't have a headset you can still interact with your peers there which is nice. So Komodo's accessible for many network device from a compatible browser and most browsers are compatible now. No downloads or software installation is required. So you don't need to have it plugged into a computer and you don't need to try to side load applications onto the headset itself. So you don't have to use any of the space available in the headset. You don't have to try to figure out how to install apps on the headset itself. That can create a huge barrier for people who are not as technically savvy as others. And it's compatible with most six-stop headsets which just means that the current generation of headsets that allow for full tracking of motion in the VR experience, so Oculus and HTC and others, their browsers are compatible with this application. As I mentioned scalability before because Komodo's not, because it's browser-based, it's accessible from a web portal you don't have to install anything. It's not restricted to 30-party platforms like the Valve Store or a Steam Valve Store or the Oculus Store. So you don't have to install or download anything that takes away a huge barrier for a lot of people. It's open sourcing free, as I mentioned, it's headset agnostic, so it's compatible with most current generation and certainly moving forward because again, because of the browser-based approach to it. And it's not required or high-end computer. So first generation of headsets that came out around 2016, you needed a very high-end GPU and computer itself. There were a lot of cables to manage. It was just like trying to install a VCR for the first time in a while. This is what I kind of remember the experience being like, where is this cable go? It's just, there was just a lot of things to do to set up. Now the current generation of headsets, you put it on and you're ready to go. So speed of innovation in VR, the reason why it's important to try to make them scalable is because this is actually, this graph is actually about a year and a half old, so it's already outdated. But as you can see, this is just a very small, small sample of all the headsets that were launched since 2016. And this doesn't include the Quest 2, the PSVR 2 that is rumored to be released in the next couple of years. HTC has over 23 headsets, so they're releasing another one. Google and Apple are also announced that are rumored to be releasing headsets. So the speed of innovation is pretty remarkable. And then quick chart there at the bottom, that's just the three that we tend to, we have several headsets, but we kind of adopted the Oculus series more. So the Rift, the Go and the Quest, as you can see, total circulation for those up to February 2020, this is tied to an article I wrote, so that's why the data stopped around that point. They were used pretty heavily. So two Quest headsets were used, almost 190,000 minutes through to 22 checkout. So we tried to encourage semester-long loans for those when the pandemic started. So pretty interesting. Just a quick ecosystem there of the headsets that we have available here at the Granger, Jnr and IRB, but these are from the top to the right, up and down. These are kind of how the technology was released. Starting with Oculus Rift in 2016, and then the Pro, the Vive Pro, the Go, the Rift S, the Quest in the bottom, the Valve Index in the Quest 2 where we are now. So you can see a lot of things have remained the same, but the headsets have gotten much better, much more portable, much more adoptable in the last just five years alone. So a lot of hardware, and again, this is not all of them. If I would not be able to fit all of them just from the last five years that I tried. But because Komodo is browser-based, it essentially kind of takes that problem out of the equation because as long as the browser is, as long as we can adapt the Komodo platform to be browser-compatible, it will be future-proof in many ways. Oculus is dominant currently in the consumer market. That's because HTC has largely focused on enterprise headsets and they've essentially pulled out of the consumer market and they don't want to compete with Oculus. Google and Apple, as I said, are rumored to be developing new headsets. Hopefully that means that Oculus gets some competition because they need some competition to keep the, I think to keep the technology moving forward and so that they keep the price point down. Many VR, some of the other issues for scalability is that many VR apps are exclusive to one platform or another and then even when they're available through Oculus, sometimes they're only compatible with Rift S as opposed to the Quest or the Quest 2. So that's because you have to install things on the computer and tether the headset or you have to install things on the headset. So again, the browser-based approach overcomes, helps overcome those challenges largely. As I mentioned, the social VR aspect is really compelling, essentially the conferencing functionality. A lot of the things I've encountered with Zoom personally is that it feels very impersonal. So even though you're looking at, like I said before, you can be looking at 30 people on the screen and you know them and you're all laughing and you're engaging with each other, something about not being in the same physical or even virtual space, I think. Just takes away the just intimacy of just being around other people, which we know after the last year is really important just for our own development and for our own mental health. So we think that we wanted to make sure to provide as much engagement functionality into Commodos possible. So that includes voice chat and screen sharing. So you can kind of see it underwrite where you can chat with somebody that panel selected right now, but you can also quote unquote call them so you have a video call with them and you can do screen sharing. So it's kind of nice. And again, this is available if you're into headset or if you're out of the headset so that if students don't have access to the headsets or the right headset in some instances that they're not left out, they can still engage. They don't get the same immersive experience but they're essentially still at least have some amount of interaction with their colleagues, which I think is important. We don't want to marginalize communities or creating any more barriers. We want to make sure to be going in the other direction. And in this functionality allows, as I said already, they can interact within the headset or just from a network device. So from your phone or from a computer or laptop. And yeah, I think that shared social experience is really important. Just in the social environment, just for fun but also in an educational environment. There's something about being in this, there's some pedagogical advantage to being in the same space as your peers. Makes engagement with them, makes the learning better. And I'm pretty sure there's a tremendous amount of research that supports that. Accessibility, users can engage with or without the VR headset. So we think that's a major plus of the accessibility of the application but also speech text is something we're testing. So right now it will record everything that's said and I'll talk about the data privacy issues in a second because we know that's a thing that librarians are particularly concerned with. Right, we so. But speech and text we think has huge potential for accessibility and potentially going in the other direction, text to speech. And both of those are available through Azure Cognitive Services which is a tool that we're using currently right now with Komodo to allow for speech to text but it also gives you the ability to go in the other direction. So we think that's something we want to export again to improve the accessibility of the platform. And in future work, this is more about the technology itself. That's something we want to explore is just hand tracking. So if you can't grip the controllers for whatever reason the Oculus Quest right now, the Quest you have something called hand tracking. So the cameras on the headset will scan your hands and detect them and that'll generate virtual hands in your experience that then you can interact with the environment. The bigger problem right now is that the technology is kind of again ahead of the software because not because you have to program the functionality of hand tracking into the VR experience as well as the hardware. So that's what we hope that as a technology and the headsets are adopted more and more in the commercial environment that more and more applications will have hand tracking built into the experience. And we hope to incorporate that into Komodo as well. And then if you do want to use the controllers just thinking of applications for haptic feedback. So you're holding, you have special gloves or controllers and you get the physical sensation that of objects you're interacting with in your physical and in your virtual environment. So just imagine if I was visually impaired but I wanted to read a book with a braille item in the virtual experience. If I was able to do that with haptic gloves I think that would be tremendous tremendous towards the accessibility. And then there are a lot of other applications we can think of for that type of tool. Data capture of course, as I mentioned before the Komodo right now allows for capture of data during sessions and what we mean by that is primarily it's tracking the movement of the headset and the controllers for each user in a virtual session. And we think again, this is not so much to create the students. In fact, we're going to discourage that it's more to evaluate and assess the students' engagement with the virtual experience and content. It tells me as an instructor like how interested were they that the students even move the headset or controllers? Is that telling me that they're not actually engaged with what I'm showing them or teaching them? And what can I do to change that? And we're very interested of course in protecting the privacy and data for our users. So the platforms are using industry standards for data protection and we're making sure that we are in compliance with FERPA. So no one can get access to that data aside from the student if they wanna see their own information. And if they've agreed to allow the instructor to that they would have to sign a release for that. And this is kind of about a place but I almost added this last second because it's really important and I almost forgot about it but kind of tied to data capture is that you can record the sessions within the VR. So if you do a lab for an hour and you have students who are unable to attend if you're teaching because they're for whatever reason they were not available they didn't have a headset maybe or they were in another part of the world where there was a different time zone you can record the sessions, send them a link and they can view it online, which is really nice. So it allows for that asynchronous viewing asynchronous teaching and learning. And then that's just some of the that's just the part of the platform that gives you information on sessions and assets and interactions and data captures. For the technology itself kind of a lot of boxes during the right but that's the workflow right now for how Komodo works pushing it towards the VR client the web port or the browser the relay server data pipeline for the data collection CDN. But primarily in its current phase Komodo will provide out of the box features like runtime model imports, real time voice text and video chat, social VR avatar presence. So you're represented by an avatar it's not life like right now and what we do we are concerned is making sure we have the availability of diverse avatar so that if I want an avatar that represents me in however or whatever that means to me I will have options to change the color palette of the avatar or any of multiple other features. So we are thinking of that. That's kind of another accessibility feature too for us because we want to it's important for even to even when you're into VR experience that you feel represented and of course data analytics for the assessment and capture of the data. Some of the core the platform uses the WebXR framework used to be web VR framework for the application and networking. We're trying to incorporate unity and then the WebXR framework custom relay API custom build server. For the runtime imported models and domain modules we use GLTF currently and then we're trying to also incorporate unity asset from those in the future. That actually is probably a few months old so I think we've made some progress in that as well. For web portal metrics pipeline some of the tools and applications are a reactive view of Python and of course my SQL, leave that first again because I know it's a lot of information and then we will be sharing the slide deck after if you want to look at the information closer to some use cases and they've kind of really talked about them. This is Andres Schleife. He is a faculty, he's a professor in the materials material science and engineering department. He teaches a course and he wanted to be able to show visual visual representations of what he calls a Miller in disease and other other content for his course in an immersive environment. So we tested this out with him this past fall semester. So he was really happy with it and he's on sabbatical now but moving forward we intend to support his course and build more functionality into his module so that all their material science and engineering faculty or anyone interested in having similar content available to them can use that module for their own teaching learning which is nice. And the second use case that I'll talk about is the fashion illustration course. So you can see on the right there somebody using a headset and they are and it's being projected onto the screen behind them. These are 3D models of dresses or office that were designed by students and the idea that you hear is that your peers go into the VR experience with you and then you get critiqued on your outfit. Other examples of the images on the bottom left there as well. So it's the assignment there is critique in a virtual experience. So this is for Professor Keara Vincenzi and she's very interested in more immersive and engaging ways to evaluate students' designs not only for the peers to look at them but also for the students to look at their own designs in the VR environment to see. Before I actually put the work into like fabricating this outfit, can I look at can I look at the design in the VR experience and I get the perspective of standing in front of it and walking around it and I get the I'm at the right height with the dress and then I can see get some ideas of how I can iterate on the design and change it before I put the work into actually building a dress in reality. This is done this past spring and summer. Other future directions kind of aligning with that crowd source development is that we have a large, well it was suspended temporarily because of the pandemic but Illinois has a large computer science virtual reality course as you can see it's 498 of VR. So it's taught by two faculty. It's a huge course of 40 to 50 student led project teams. This is kind of like a capstone course. They try to get real world projects for companies or faculty or anyone who wants a VR experience built. That way the students get to develop something that's actually going to be used on these community primarily. Oh sorry, 400 students, 40 to 50 student led teams. So teams have multiple students in them. So what we're thinking of moving forward is that so that students don't have to spend time and energy programming the core functionality of each application they build. They can just use Komodo and that has that basic platform already built for them. That way they can focus on the specific needs of the assignments or of the sponsor or customers. So we think that that's a model that's probably gonna be a sustainable way for us to support multiple modules moving forward and also provide the students that a very unique experience, a very real world experience that they can then build things, build something for a portfolio. And if they are looking for a job in the future, they can just send a link and say, I helped build this module, give me a job steam or give me a job Oculus. So we think we hope we're excited for this potential once the pandemic is over, we hope to partner with the class to use this model moving forward. So just kind of tying everything together is continuing development, building more domain modules. So we hope to scale up over time. And one of the ways is that we submitted NSF research on emerging technologies for teaching and learning grant this past January that was to fund three, campus three, I'm sorry, three modules. So to be competitive, internal to Illinois faculty or other students and staff and researchers can submit will be able to submit a proposal to get funded for up to $85,000 for a three year period, one time grant. And then they can build something with the understanding that it has to tie into Komodo and then be available to the public once it is built. We're also funding an immersive applications, immersive scholarship applications developer who will liaise between the projects and with the ideal app team to build those modules and also build additional functionality on the core platform itself. So we hope that gets funded. If not, we're gonna continue looking for other funding. So, because we think that's the model to scale up the platform over time by securing more funding and by working with campus development partners who get their own funding so that they don't have to spend the precious resource of money that they have on building the core functionality. They can just use Komodo and focus their time and energy and money on their subject specific needs. And then goal would be is to have this be a campus wide service here at Illinois. But certainly we want to release a free and open source SDK for these by the public because we want everyone to be able to use this and install an instance of this platform at their own school or their own organization. And then their faculty students is that can build their own modules off of that. The SDK will be built with the idea of it being really easy to install. So very minimal expertise hopefully will be required for that. So that is currently underway now. But if you're interested in a demo being an early beta tester or being a development partner, please email me. So summary, what is the Komodo platform? You can instantly deploy a VR classroom session. You can manage those sessions with the web portal. You can upload models or media. So 3D models, video files, we're incorporating other content such as browser instances and just Excel file things of that nature that's currently being explored right now. And the platform gives you the ability to capture data and then evaluate it to analyze student asset and session statistics. So let's you look at how your students are engaging with your content as an instructor. Komodo is going to be ultimately an SDK and a web service. So it's gonna make it easy for our own faculty here in campus to deploy their own VR experiences but also open to the public as well and allow others to do the same thing. So it will be open source and a sandbox. And we hope that it becomes a catalyzer just for instruction of VR moving forward. Certainly at Illinois, but hopefully across academia so that other institutions, even if they build their own platform, kind of get the idea like, well, why don't we do this? We can build our own thing that we can do a similar browser-based approach. So we can promote the use of this emerging technology at our institutions. And with this, I'll turn it over to my colleague Bill. I'm gonna give Alex's voice one minute rest here and talk a little bit about why the library which paraphrased is, why should the library be engaged in developing this campus-wide infrastructure for VR-related instruction and research? We think there's a couple of good reasons for this. Actually, this is a question we hear more from librarians than we do from disciplinary or subject teaching faculty. So the answer to this is that at least in our case, libraries are the most visited facilities on campus. These are stats for the Granger Engineering Library, but there are times during the semester if you look at simultaneous wireless connections within a building that the Granger Engineering Library is the busiest, the busiest building on campus. It's really the ultimate manifestation of this idea of library as a place, which we've all talked about for years, provides informal learning environment. We have spent a lot of time and effort on making the libraries into collaboratories, focusing on collaborations spaces, entrepreneurial spaces, innovation spaces. That's something we talk about a lot, not particularly in terms of the Granger Engineering Library. So this is a natural for that. It's certainly a safe space for students to learn. We have a great quote we got from a computer science student last year who said that libraries are more important in the classroom, but this was the place where people learn. The collaboration that they do between students and the learning opportunities, the learning environments are extremely important. Of course, it's discipline neutral. We cover every area in the university and the values here include democratizing access to technology and concepts, which is something here that the libraries have been focused on. This is just another information, literacy or just another teaching tool and the library should be involved in that. And of course, you could argue that the library has always been involved with that. I'll turn this back over to Alex. Thanks, Bill. So we kind of get an idea of why the library's involved with this, but why is it, why virtual reality now? And we all kind of have a sense of this, but I always like to kind of put it together in a slide just to remind myself too. And as Bill mentioned, in many times to my own colleagues in the library are the ones asking this, like, why are we investing all this into VR and why is the library involved? Why can anyone else do this? So we kind of get an idea of why the library's involved, but why virtual reality? So it's been available for the last 30 years or so with the device they called the sort of Damocles, which is this massive ceiling mounted, more of an AR headset. It was essentially, it became too heavy to be adopted in the commercial market because most buildings couldn't withstand the weight. There was a Nintendo boy back in the 90s. And I like to use that instruction to date myself with the students because they don't remember the Nintendo virtual boy. But VR has been around for a while, but really since 2016, VR has become more affordable, scalable and adaptable. And we saw that previous slide where it's like eight or nine popular headsets just from 2016 alone. So VR is increasingly being integrated into research and instruction in general, as we saw with the interest and seed grants and in attending workshops and in our own experiences at our institutions. We know VR is a big thing now. And these technologies extend the lab in classrooms so that you're not limited by just your physical space and what's physically available to you. You can essentially reach any virtual world as long as the application's available or you can develop it, but you're no longer limited by space. It provides faculty, students with virtual environments and generates discipline-specific simulations. So if you wanted to go to Chernobyl to look at the control room, you obviously can do that now, but if you can create a simulation of it when it was going melting down, if you can teach your students about the issues around nuclear safety in your VR environments and make it really immersive with sound and smoke and people running around. And I think we all agree, it makes learning more visceral, more engaging and more immersive. So it's just not the 2D screen experience. You're actually actively involved in it. It surrounds you. And why now? Why VR? Why the library? Why now? Design thinking pedagogy has been in academia. I think I heard, I started talking about it with Bill and other colleagues when I started in the library back in 2007. And certainly that's accelerated in the last decade or five years, certainly. We see that in almost every department now has some amounts of design thinking, human-centered design, pedagogy in their departments. Emerging technologies are more scalable and affordable. So 3D printing, of course, but VR, of course, in our example, it's cheaper. It's easier to use. It's more portable, it's more user-friendly. And scholarship is increasingly born digital and relying on that emerging tech to be built. So I think we're gonna see a lot more research using VR, AR and all these technologies, immersive technologies moving forward. And we have an opportunity certainly since I've been, at least at Granger since 2007, where I've seen with the reliance on, or in digital content or the emphasis on that, we've seen the reliance on book stacks, particularly in STEM, but other fields as well, has gone down. So those collections have been relocated to storage facilities, and we've had the opportunity to reimagine what the library facility, the space looks like. What can we do with the space? So it is all kind of aligned at the same time. And we certainly know that the pandemic has shown us that we have a very real need for multimodal tools right now. We need something more engaging. We need something beyond Zoom. So VR, I think, moving forward, there's gonna be a new normal that's not going to be, we're not gonna return to the way it was. Teaching learning is gonna be with us in some way from now on, essentially, moving forward. So I think VR has a way to make that a little more successful, because we see students are suffering right now with the, quote unquote, Zoom classroom. So either ways to use this technology to make the experience better for them and to make it easier to teach to, because that's the other side of that coin. So if you have any questions, please let me know. Sorry, that's my virtual business card. We have our superhero cards. Feel free to email me. I'm happy to answer questions. I have a quick Zoom call with you. I have a chat. Just thank you to a lot of other partners. This is not just us that did this. We got a lot of funding from the technology services at our institution, and then we had a lot of partners. This is not even everybody, but this is a lot of the people that make this possible. So we'd like to thank them. If you have any questions, there's our website, the Granger Engineering Library, the ID Lab, which is located in the Granger Library, and then Project Komodo there. That is a URL. You can visit it now, and then there's a link there if you want to become a beta tester. And if you want to just download the source code, it's available from our GitHub instance there, along with every other software that we've developed in Granger. And we have a number of other tools that we've developed. So go ahead, go there, do a pull request. You can download it for free. Oh, I don't know how this got in here. So let's go back here. So yes, I think we have about 10 minutes. So if you have any questions, please let us know. We have three good questions. That's great. Thank you. Yeah, this was really great. Thanks so much, Alex and Bill. This is really fascinating work. And we do have some questions, so I'm just gonna get right to it. The first question has to do with privacy. Although you may have answered this question, but I'm not sure this may be related directly to Oculus, the use of Oculus. With Facebook's control of Oculus, are there any privacy concerns? I have an Oculus Go and the firmware upgrades require an account creation with Facebook. Yes, that has been a major concern for us and we actually are hoping to release a survey to our peers. So you may see that soon across the list are where we hope to ask everybody what their thoughts are in that so that we can present data to Facebook and say, this is not sustainable for us. If you don't give an exemption to us, there's really no way we can meaningfully continue supporting the Oculus platform right now. The suspicion is that the, so the Oculus too was released at a much lower price point, I believe it was $200 or $300, which seemed really low, but they then announced that you would require a Facebook account. So that kind of made, there was a very suspicious connection between it too, because they knew HTC was pulling out of the market. So we hope that we can, that academia can exert enough pressure on them that they will have an education exemption because there's still a lot of mistrust behind Facebook and not only them, other platforms certainly as far as the protection of student data. So that is a concern that we have at the present. I believe that, I wasn't unaware that the go and the quest one were required. I know the quest two automatically from the beginning or it makes you create a Facebook account. So I'll have to look into that deeper. So, this is a huge issue that a lot of people are concerned about. So we're hoping that the pressure on Facebook will make them change. Okay, great. Thank you for addressing that. Thanks for the question, Andrew. Next question is from Joan. Hi Joan. Joan Lippincott asks, will you do any interviews or other assessment to confirm whether you're feeling that students without VR headsets can participate and feel like they're part of the social group as much as students with the headsets? Yeah, so tied to the grant that we submitted to NSF but we'll certainly do this without the grant courses. We're going to be doing a research study starting in the fall where every course that we do support with a module, we are going to see if the fact that the person and students are willing to participate in a research study and that will be, interviews will certainly be part of that because we do want to evaluate like if you are not, if you don't have a headset, are you getting something out of this experience still and what type of experience do you have? What is the benefits? And then is that gonna give us information that then we can add to the functionality or maybe pivot into how we're doing it? So certainly we focus groups and interviews are going to be part of it. Great, thank you. Thank you for the question, Joan. Okay, we have another question now. Can multiple students manipulate a 3D object in Komodo together at the same time or is it limited to one person to manipulate at a time assuming they're all wearing a headset and how natural is the experience? So what I would say is the first intent for us is that that is something that we took into consideration. So the instructor will have their own version that everyone can see, but each student will have their own copy of it that then they can manipulate. But having groups being able to interact with the same object is something that we want to explore because we were more concerned with individual students being able to have their own model to interact with but because we want to have this social VR experience, kind of what I was emphasizing earlier that having groups being able to manipulate the same object. There are a lot of technical issues that kind of make that very difficult but that's definitely something we want to incorporate as well. Okay, thank you. And Boyun has another follow up question here. Would you say the Komodo platform significantly lowers the work required from instructors to incorporate 3D content and VR into their course? And could you say a bit more about what work is done by instructors versus what work is done by library staff to support it? That's a great question. So it depends on what type of model and the instance of the KRV Agency's course for the 3D models from Tilt Brush, it was a object file that we supported. So using the web portal, you are able to upload or import, I should say, that model into the VR experience itself, into the VR. So where the Komodo team comes into it, they have to provide for the functionality to import the media types into the experience. But like originally I wanted a 2D browser panel so I can do a library instruction in the virtual environment or teach about VR within VR. Browser instances actually turned out to be very difficult which kind of surprised me but that is something we want to continue. So we want to continue making sure we can import and support as many multimedia artifacts as possible because different subject areas have very specific media needs. Just thinking of a DITOM files in medicine, those are the medical imaging files, something of that nature. And the second, well, I'm sorry, well, this is the second part of that, that was... Could you say a bit more about what work is done by instructors versus what work is done by library staff? Yeah, so it's essentially they, we do a consultation with them and first to determine what type of media file specific to their subject area that they want to incorporate and then we determine if that's possible within the WebXR or the current platform. And if not, how do we make, how do we provide it for that functionality? But once we do provide for that, then the instructor can just do it from the web portal interface. We're no longer involved in it after that point. Excellent. I would also add that one of the focuses of our work here has been on providing infrastructure so that people can build 3D objects using either open software or commercial software and fairly easily get these into a VR environment. Yeah, so again, that's a sort of... That was just a, that's like a 3D printable file actually as well. So it's, you can use it in different technologies, which is nice. So you're able to incorporate quite a lot of media types. That's sort of lowest, lowest hanging fruit that we've tried to get to make available for people. It's really tremendous how you've lowered so many of the barriers here. Congratulations. Really interesting work. We still have a minute or two more if there are any other questions. Please feel free to type those into the Q&A box. And I would encourage anybody who has questions or in-depth questions to send us an email. And so we're very happy to talk to you. If you're interested in having a version to come up at your institution, we're not quite at the point to make that possible, but we are looking for early partners so that we can begin determining what is needed to make the SDK as portable as possible. So if you're interested in early developer partnerships. Terrific. All right, well, thank you so much to our speakers today, to our attendees for joining us. I see we're close to the hour here. So I'm going to go ahead and turn off the recording, but I think Alex and Bill can hang around a little bit longer and chat with folks. If any of our attendees wanna stay with us, I'd be happy to enable your microphone after the recording ends. So with that, thank you all very much for joining us here at CNI. We look forward to seeing you back in the days that come. Bye-bye.