 And it's my honor to introduce Professor Julia Levy, who's going to be talking about how not to be a replicant. It's a useful VR. And I will hand it off directly to her. Thank you very much. And thank you all for being here. It's day two of what is really an amazing, for those of you who weren't here for the whole day, we've been having a great time. But we may also be a little bit tired. So don't take that against me. I mean, I might be a bit slower or just confusing, because right now I'm having a hard time just managing the tech. But I'm really grateful to be here. And I'm grateful to have been invited, because I really hope that we get the opportunity to talk about immersive tech and pedagogy in the humanities more often than mixed reality, the wide array of technologies that that includes. And on that note, I really hope that you are aware of just how groundbreaking it is to be having this conversation at all. I mean, pedagogy in the research universities is like somewhere lowest rung. I mean, there might be some lip service paid to it, but really it's not a priority. And then technology in the service of pedagogy, that's right there. It might be below. It depends on which university you are. So having a conversation in which we're talking about cutting edge technology in the service of cutting edge pedagogy, I just want to acknowledge sort of respect and gratitude for a workshop that is all too rare and an opportunity that's just really, I'm extremely grateful to the organizers. I know you guys have been working really hard at this. So I also, and I'm a toggling between technologies yesterday, I gave a workshop. I don't think everybody was here, but I mentioned the team that has made it possible for me to do VR as a non-technologist. But I didn't give you their names and that was an enormous oversight and that's just wrong. And so today I will introduce them by name. Tony, she's an amazing human being who spent 20 years at Intel working in their research labs and then was tired with the corporate side of it and now is pretty much just really invested in doing VR projects. I mean, she came up with a useful VR concept and she's the one that I talked to and who's capable of executing the ideas that I sort of try to formulate. And Tom Wester is really a visionary in, he's done different forms of immersive media but he's really particularly interested in sort of the interactive, the embodied part of it and so a lot of his immersive projects have been sort of really used the body as part of the formulation that you see. So one of the latest ones that he's done with Melissa Painter is a yoga and VR experience. But what you're, you're not seeing yourself, it's telling you to do movements in sort of an interesting way and as you breathe and as you move and there are all sorts of sort of interesting sensors that aren't on you so you're very free to move, a tree starts growing out of the ground and the tree starts growing spread. So it's just, it's gorgeous and it's not at all real, right? I mean, like nobody's done yoga that way but it sort of gives a new dimension to what you could do with your body in VR which may be what virtual reality is, right? It's not reality, it's the, this is sort of a different way. So Michael, Sonia and Karen and Alyssa are, were the developers that have at different stages have sort of exactly sort of been able to understand the ideas and sort of execute them in code. Okay, feel much better now. All right, so remembering to move on. So, oh, this is something else. This is Flamingos, by the way. This is Tom, gave a class on VR in an art school at Portland, at the Portland Art Museum and no, a school of arts. And you can, if you have an iPhone, you can just download Flamingos and it's free and by all means download it and have the Flamingos walk around while I'm talking because that's what it's going to be. The picture I had up here, this is them, they were on my desk last night. I just decided to invite them into the room and they have sound and so when they get too close to you they'll squawk, so you can create a whole flock. And it's in many ways, I do love the kind of the magical part of VR. I'll come out and sort of, you'll figure it out by the end of this talk that I am, I like the part of VR that isn't real and things, the ones that sort of Darren Lanier noticed when he sort of just looked at his hand in VR and it wasn't that, it was sort of these different forms but they responded to him and so he had sort of this weird relationship that was wonderful and it's that magic that I just want us to be able to explore more. But we should ask why I'm here and UCR has a lot to do it but with it then this is sort of, this is just, well no, I'll leave the Flamingos up, they're much nicer. Why am I here? We haven't met at the MLA or the AMLS. I'm not a cultural historian and the theories that I work with are economic theories. I research financial markets in Latin America. I do quantitative history and some people are looking at me like oh, you're the, they know, right? So, why am I here? Why is an economic historian who's otherwise, we're all known to be boring, uninteresting and totally on the wrong side of the social sciences here, well, those of you who were here I think I, you know, I revealed the mystery yesterday. But I, even economic historians are instructors. We teach, right? And I think that's what we all have in common here, right? We are committed and for one reason or another to teaching our students and to engaging with them with the technology that is sort of increasingly entering into our, into our world scape. And so, you know, teaching is not what my degree trained me in. It's not what my advisor suggests that I do but it turns out that it's something I really enjoy doing and it's been sort of one of the great discoveries of my sort of post PhD and it's been a while now. Life that I really like doing this and I like figuring out new ways of solving problems in the classroom. And so, I teach, now it's relevant. I teach at a very large public university and it is a very diverse one. Our student body is 41% Hispanic, 33% Asian, 11% white. The faculty is predominantly male and white. I came from an undergraduate institution in my study of political science in Brussels where let's just say that the faculty was predominantly male and white. And then I did a stint in banking which is predominantly male and white. And then I did economic history at UCLA where the things started to sort of shift a little bit. But to say that my education was traditional is really sort of an understatement. But before I came to UCR, I taught at a small rural college. My classes were small. My students were, it's Virginia, were white. They were very nice. They knew very little about Latin America and they were mostly interested in sort of genocide and revolutions in that area. And then a year later I was at UCR. My class looked very different. My students were very nice. They knew very little about Latin America. They thought they knew but they didn't actually. They were mostly interested in genocide and revolutions in there. The audience changed. The problems were the same. But what did change is that I had a lot more students. I had a very, very diverse audience and it was enormous. And so digital platforms and methods is really what saved me from having to sort of lecture to endless amounts of faces for ours on end. And it showed me how I could essentially sort of manipulate the architecture of the classroom in a way that was much more effective than moving tables, which is what we did yesterday. So the architecture of the classroom, it's a thing and it matters and when you have a lot of students, there's a limited amount of things you can do in an auditorium where the seats are still. Before I start talking about digital platforms, I do wanna make sure that you understand that I am not a convert or an apologist for eduTech. I generally view educational technology vendors with enormous skepticism. I mean, it's not that I don't think that if there are any educational technologists in the room, I don't have apologies. It's not that I don't think educational technology provides some services that are totally helpful, but it really is about measurement very often and monitoring and touch points and feedback loops and all sorts of keywords that I just don't associate with teaching, right? Teaching is about connection. It's about establishing, really about establishing a connection with each one of those students and I couldn't do it in a large classroom without technology and but again, educational eduTech is not digital pedagogy, but what the tech can do and what I've embraced it for is really sort of to design a more accessible classroom and more accessible curriculum at a scale that works, a scale that works at UCR and I have no means of knowing what I have. So there you go, there's a classroom. I thought it would be kind of good for you. This is normal. How many of you work in this kind of an environment? All right, so essentially I'm describing a radically new world to you. Trust me, if you taught this, your relationship to digital platforms to teach and when I'm saying digital platforms, I'm just gonna go out and say it. I teach online very often. It just makes things, I mean it just makes this possible that wouldn't be possible otherwise. So I mean, I know that to a lot of people who don't teach classrooms that look like this, online instruction is anathema. I mean, it's the beginning of the end. I am the enemy. I've been told that by some of my colleagues. I am paving the road to a dystopian future in which we're all replaced by bots. And so I just wanna give you a slightly different, everything that I've done, everything I talk about today I've done in online classrooms and in face-to-face classrooms. So it turns out that a classroom is just another platform, right? It's just the one that we're used to. But if you go online, it's not about recreating, it's about just thinking differently. So, but if you teach 30 students, that's great, you can have a connection which is what I mean. You teach more than them and the face-to-face experience starts to get diluted. 40 students in that back row is getting really, really deep. 50 students inaccessible, right? The online classroom doesn't have a front row. Like if we were online, it'd be complicated with, I mean, it'd be different, but I'd see you all. I wouldn't know who's sitting in the back row and you wouldn't know that you're in the back row either, right? So, I mean, sort of, it's not a monitoring technique but it is a way to look people in the eye. It doesn't require a particular type of body or body type to access. All my lectures on all the material is captions, it's transcribed, it's, nobody needs to do anything to have access to it and the curriculum's entirely transparent so students know from day one what all the assignments are going to be, they know when they're going to be due, they have a sense of where they're going. So it shifts sort of a large part of the surprise part of like, ooh, pop quiz and no, you need to come to every class because otherwise you will miss something really important for the final but it changes the relationship that I have with students which is one of responsibility and mutual respect which is I respect you to follow this and you will, how can expect for me that I will get you here? It's, and so the digital classroom also allows you or allows me to design a course that relies much more on the students than on me. I'm no longer the only expert in the room, you can structure a series of environments in which students become sort of the drivers of the content, they're guardrails and they're a series of controls, right? Because I'm still the expert in the room and that is what I'm being paid for but you can trust them to explore a lot more on their own and so since we're not spending time moving around or parking or looking for anything sort of where my bag is or where the bathroom is which are all sort of important social engagements but what I can do is I can ask students to spend a lot more time doing research. I can ask them to go to the library, the virtual or the physical one, I can ask them to work together on these digital platforms in ways that they are actually quite comfortable doing and so it becomes a much more interesting space in which to explore how to teach a large group of students and it was sort of returning to the diversity. I teach a 20th century history class. The canon of the 20th century is Eurocentric at I think sort of that's the best thing we can say about it, it's sort of Anglo Eurocentric, there's sort of a Africa exists but in the 20th century it only exists after the 60s because there's nothing before and then it's like oh and then there was decolonization and students were like from what? But none of that is part of it and so I've kind of turned that curriculum into a game and by game I don't mean that I'm gamifying it in the sense that it's fun because it's still class and there's still grades but essentially it's kind of a make your own adventure through it, I teach them, I explain you guys need to know what the canon is if only so you can engage with it and so that's one half of the classes, follow me along. Let me tell you what people have decided is the history of the 20th century and the other half of the class is okay now here's something like in this decade use this set of documentary sources but write about whatever you want, choose a continent, choose a country, choose a city and the next week we move on to so I've done it chronologically because there's only so many levers you can move with it where the four people get very confused but essentially students, the writing assignments are things that students get to choose themselves they can write about parts of the world that aren't even mentioned in the class and the textbook in any other class that they've always been interested in but that essentially the canon doesn't allow them to do and so that is something that would really be difficult to do in a large lecture class with 450 students largely because there are expectations about how those classes work where students arrive to sit down they wait for you to give them a lecture, fall asleep, they check Facebook and then they go to discussion section where the TA tells them everything that was important in the lecture and they take notes on that and then they start prepping for the midterm which is gonna be in about three weeks and the TA kind of preps them for that exam and so they focus on what the TA tells them they need to know and that's what they read and then we do the same thing for the final and maybe there's a pop quiz there's always extra credit and so all these but once you kind of take away those restraints of well we can only do three assignments because there's 450 students and only so many TAs and you kind of also part of what happens in the online classroom is that the TAs have a different way to work their time is used differently and so they have a lot more time to engage with students so anyway, so I'm a this is not a keynote about online teaching but I realize that I deviated a little bit I'm a proponent of online teach because I've seen how it shifts and essentially I had to tell you this because this is how I got into the digital platforms the answer to why I'm here is because of online teaching the last 10 years of using digital platforms to teach that there's a leap of sorts and forgive the pun it's not a magic leap but it's a real one and that's why I'm here like I use digital platforms I teach online and then I teach the other sort of a nice narrative there before the VR experience I spoke about yesterday which I'll sort of hint at today I did something else I did a project that included zombies and I think that's on this slide now this is what passes for participation by the way in large classrooms it's a clicker, I hate them I've never used them, they're the worst well largely because it's like the students have to buy them so it's apart from buying $300 textbook they have to buy a stupid $17 clicker I realize it's, no I just, I use Twitter it's there's better things then anyway, I didn't sleep enough so I'm going to have a lot of cider but so digital zombies is remember scale is what matters, right? So digital zombies is a game you can go look at it you can do all sorts of things while I'm talking at it I'm perfectly happy for people to be on their computers while you know I'm not a no tech in the classroom person obviously it was, it's a kind of a research game it's a library game that is built into a historical research methods class it's, I use it in a face-to-face class and in an online class so it's not just, the class is not just the digital zombies games there's a bunch of other stuff that's going on but it essentially is sort of the structure of the assignments for the students and it's a way for students all built around World War Z and zombies and you know you need to learn this so that you don't become a digital zombie and yes it's, you know it's a catchy concept but it was the whole point was to get students to engage with library material both digital and physical to kind of experience the hierarchy of information because I can talk about the hierarchy information but it was difficult to get them to experience it and so in the library they understood there's again the physical environment matters right there are floors and there's ways in which it's organized there are people that would explain to you why are you going to find most of the Latin American history books on the stacks under F but then you know when you go to H it's going to be more economics and somewhere in between you might find economic history not that I teach that very often because we're the devil remember, yes I'm the devil twice online and economic history but anyway so it worked really it was a great way to get a lot of students into the library regularly right not just once for a class but to do something but you know sort of after we got over ourselves and oh my God we developed a game it's really great and it's there was something missing one of the things that was we were having a hard time doing was getting students to like they were really great at finding sources and they were really great at saying well this is a good source for this and I found this source for that but when I asked them to compare like between two books like why one would be better than the other wow they're great they're both great I was like no one is actually not can you tell me why well I found them both in the stacks I mean they're reliable sources right it's like no no they're reliable sources can you tell me why this one is not going to work for the argument that you're making and so we were so we were having a really hard time and so remember so you know lots of students there are a lot of TAs but there's limited amount of time and we are teaching research methods not critical thinking and there's and you know we're trying to get them to understand the library so there's only so much you can do and we just didn't have the bandwidth to address the issue of thinking about sort of knowing how to read a book and assess it or a source right I forget I'm talking about books again I'm old and I still think of books but essentially whatever media they're reading to assess it critically and so this is where where the VR comes in right so VR is not that new you know although I did hold on I wonder if this works so now I'm gonna you guys know what this is and yeah the first VR but and now I don't have a there's no is there a cursor do you guys see a cursor on which am I going in the right anyway if I click no all right well if I if you click it it's 30 seconds of the most awesome thing and what's amazing is that we haven't it doesn't change that much I mean this contraption didn't move very well and was like seriously tethered but we are we've we have come a long enough way from from the the Sutherland sort of down experience that we're in a in a time of history where wearable sort of that sort of the head mounted contraption is much more accessible there's a much bigger variety of of of contraptions right that are easy to wear when compared to this you know and there's a lot more to experiment and experience with the software is easier to to use right you don't have to be an advanced coder to work in unity and and because it's accessible I think that's how I well I I I got to experience it I was talking to Tony who'd left Intel and she just like here I got a bunch of new assets go try this on obviously in VR it's better because everything is so imagine who's lights you're underwater and there's sound there's it's a matter of it looks sort of it doesn't look real at all but if this is like your first experience like oh you can look above see there's no like normally you nobody would stand like this right you'd be looking to the side because that's where the whale is coming it's going to take a while but more manta rays because they're cool anyway I think we can fast forward to the whale just so where's the big whale there comes the whale and there's a sound the sound of the whale is coming through my computer which is kind of where's there we go it is very cool pardon yeah the links that you and then it goes away and then wait that this is the part that this is this is actually key to the story so it's very close to you but you know it's it's a humpback while it can't hurt you except the tail and in VR this whole thing just goes like this so you know your your environment moves okay so now okay now we go back to the presentation and I think that there's I don't have a single one of these things again so I'll go I'll present one more there you go click and just at the yeah here we go all right okay so this is the next part of the conversation but you just look at my some of my favorite works of literary art but so the whale was key right so Tiana was just like here put it on and I'm like it's a two minute experience I've scuba dived before and in my brain my memory of that it's I remember that experience like like a very similar experience to any other I've never scuba I've never experienced humpback whales underwater for real but this one is somewhere in my brain in a very similar place and the part that I remember I mean that I can just conjure up right away is when the the whale moves away and the whole wreck moves and you know I had to like hold on to something right now was this but it's been a good way to learn how to scuba dive I don't think so probably not because you know there's a bunch of stuff that's missing from the experience that is included in scuba diving like water and breathing underwater but it's a really good way to sort of experience the magic of VR so back to you know seeing your hand as a bunch of geometric forms of why the it's the not real part of VR that that I just keeps me there and so I needed to make that connection with the students I kept feeling that I wasn't reaching them and we weren't reaching them because we didn't have time because we already asked them to go hunt for zombies because there's a bunch of other stuff that they needed to do I needed them to feel that wreck and to know what to do just instinctively rather than think about what it is they had to do I I didn't need them to relate emotionally to the whale but I wanted them to remember what had happened to them there and so the conversation I started having with Tony is like is there a way to leverage sort of this VR experience intellectually like is there something we can do that would get students to experience something in VR that would mean that the next time they're in the library they would they would know immediately what they were supposed to do with the books right that they would they would respond to the to the to the like to the to the impetus to the books to the space and and in a way sort of the conversation led to sort of our first design first and only design which is that VR is going to be important and our ability to sort of justify why we should do something in VR right the why VR is like the first is always present is what matters about doing something in VR is not what happens in VR is what happens when you're outside of it right so if you're having a great time in the experience but you can't we haven't helped you solve a problem differently when you're outside of it then we we have failed now I don't say that that's what has to be true for all VR right but in this specific case it needed to be something that fundamentally altered how students operated in a particular space and so I think we what we have and sort of what I presented yesterday is a prototype that responds to this wish right it's not perfect it's not finished there's a lot more work to be done but it is about operationalizing something that's really hard to teach in a large classroom in a lecture right how to think critically now we're not alone in trying to do this right where I think we're in pretty good company Kristiti at Harvard has been I think I spent the last 30 years trying to convince people that it's feasible and he's now Dean or right you know some some administrative level which would have I kind of hoped he would have gotten to do more I mean it's Harvard there's more money but anyway and the King Jeremy Balanson has spent a significant amount of time and money sort of exploring how to leverage the cognitive effects of VR and I think it's really we think about the cognitive effects of this technology that that's that's really is what I'm after and and there's a plus and a negative to side of that and but I think the broad adoption of VR and the humanities right it's there's hardware there's software there's sort of barriers to entry but I think the real thing that we need to demonstrate is that that we can do these cognitive effects that we could that they can happen in VR perhaps faster better more often than not right that these experiences a that we can build experiences that can be customized right that that so the template we're working on will fit to different contents right so that it's not sort of a one experience one goal per hundred thousand dollars more or or you know and I'm being really sort of I'm lowballing here because I think that's really sort of one of the things that the educational vendors consistently sell is like here you can do whatever you want to and just plug and play I hate it but I understand it right if we want people to access it if we want people to use it we have to make it easier to enter into the space and we have to think about what that means and how to get people who are generally really kind of worried about technology to engage with it because because what they care about is the students and students solving certain problems that are increasingly difficult to solve in a large classroom and so this is why we've made some of the distance we've made in in the VR prototype that that we're building so for those of you weren't here it's a it's a it's a it's a prototype but it sort of lives in the context of Latin American history and students are being asked to sort of make some series of sorting decisions about a text with data points that reflect other sort of sources books and surveys and what we're trying to do is to help that use that framework for other content and also use that framework to get students to sort of get a kind of a a cognitive shift we're as I said we're I'm not alone but but it's still there's a lot more I mean I really hope to see a lot more people in the space soon we are at the very beginning of sort of what mixed reality in in education is going to look like right now most of the content is being made for entertainment I mean a VR is not unrelated to film and so there's I understand that but what we're also then getting is sort of the traditions of the entertainment industry and VR right so in some ways the entertainment industry is reinventing a way to put the still camera in front of the theater it is also replicating a lot of the biases in the film and gaming industry all the blind spots of the tech world are being replicated in VR there are a lot of potentially really bad ideas out there and it's not that people are intentionally bad it's just these blind spots right are are kind of hard to convince people to sort of look beyond and so I just want to be really clear that I'm I'm I'm a loud proponent of engaging with technology with all of it even the stuff that I don't like because I'm really worried that if we don't we are going to lose the opportunity to sort of engage with the conversation about it right if we say no as it's VR is just a fad I'll just wait until the software and the hardware are easier I'll wait until somebody can give me something that I can use easily in my classroom you're going to be at the mercy of whatever educational technology has decided you need to do in VR and so let's not do that so this is when where where the who's familiar with the Sapper Worf theory of linguistic relativity who saw arrival who read the stories of okay all right so arrival so we'll just talk about the the aliens arrive and a linguist is invited there's a linguist and I think he's a physicist together have to solve this sort of like we cannot communicate with them they have a totally different language how to talk to the aliens and in learning how to talk to them she also manages to see their world view and they don't have linear time they have they see past present and future at the same time and all of a sudden she sees past present and future at the same time right language it turns out is not just a bridge between cultures all right and then sort of in in battle 17 it's can be used for you know it's also a weapon but it's a portal it's a portal into a different in into a world view and I worry right sort of my it's it's this is not a theory it doesn't exist but I could keep thinking about sort of technological volatility right that if we don't engage with this technology if we don't learn how to talk to people who are creating the software for it if we don't talk to the people who are developing the hardware for it we're going to admit and we're not just going to miss the opportunity of sitting at the table to sort of help make some of the content for it but we're going to miss the opportunity of actually understanding the world that they're creating and we're going to be at the mercy of it in so many different ways and and I just you know I don't want to belabor this to about although please do read everything Ted Chiang has ever written it will make your life significantly better and right there at least two people in this room that agree with me or three and everybody else trust Flemingos great Ted Chiang even better so I think it's just and and and this is probably not the right room to who might need to tell that we just need to understand technology right because I mean I'm just going to use the example of people who don't know what to search what search engine optimization is are victims of search engine optimization it's okay if you don't know what search engine optimization is no everybody knows okay we're moving on if we ignore the technology we're it's victims and so and it's sort of there's a I keep thinking with sort of historical comparisons right so when the phone started getting smaller and smaller at the beginning they were just getting smaller and we couldn't imagine that the phone could possibly be a computer I mean computers were big and phones were big and then well computers were getting smaller and phones were getting small but we didn't think they were I mean I didn't believe it nobody told me that there was going to that I would barely use my phone to call anyone today right I don't call anymore because calling is so personal I use it for all sorts of other things and so I think like in many ways VR we're like this is where we are right now remember this thing remember the palm pilot right nobody used it I mean some people used it and they thought it was amazing and we looked at them like you're so weird why would you want to carry that thing around like why do you want to answer your email on this thing and so I think VR is sort of the palm pilot we're at the kind of palm pilot of the 80s and and if you know if we don't include more women more people of color more people that are not in the United States into this technology it's going to be a nice white Anglo technology that is just not you know where I don't think so I think the fact that this room is here is proof that this is not going to happen and then there's some people doing really awesome stuff and so what follows now is a little bit sort of it's the good the bad and the ugly of VR it's a I hate industry reviews but guess what it's an industry review and it's a kind of an exploration of what VR offers this a little bit today what you might see on campus it's a provocation I'm probably going to say things that you don't like you're going to get mad at me and I think I'm wrong and that's great because then we'll have a great conversation but essentially this is sort of in service of us not becoming replicants and this is where the title of the talk sort of comes in Alex and I had a conversation about the title it was very difficult for me to I'm not actually going to talk about Blade Runner but I do think that it is one both of them are some of the great best movies ever and I will fight anyone on that it's not the hill I'll die on but I will I do think that you know if we're thinking about the relationship between human and machines which this room must do on a regular basis touring tests and celluloid futures you know this this that movie is great and you know sort of thinking about Blade Runner as if and the fact that the new Blade Runner is just as great as the old one and you know they've sort of incorporated was it 25 years of technological change into it about the same thing that's happening in VR and film right so how do people imagine VR right now we don't have a Blade Runner yet like a movie that I think sort of imagines VR in a way that I think is realistic I mean and I'm just pulling up like the two latest options right Ready Player One I don't know it doesn't feel like VR to me it's just it's a game that happens to be tethered in a bit it's got you know striking vipers I know you saw it anybody I highly recommend you see it just to see what the worst possible future imagination like what people are imagining VR is essentially it's it's the Black Mirror it's one of the latest Black Mirror installments and in this VR it's like VR is it's not it's it's there's no lens it's a chip that you stick to your brain and honestly it's like LSD I mean not that I've ever done LSD but I think that's what LSD would be like which is you take a pill or you stick it on your brain and then you just go somewhere else and experience really wild things and so it's like I don't think people you know we can talk about VR but I think most of the people in VR I mean like outside of this room I don't think people think about VR and so that is another problem right because if you don't know back to if you can't even imagine and if the media isn't providing you with an image of VR that is well that's kind of realistic then then then you know it kind of pushes people away from it so there again there we go that's that's the it's just visuals so now I mean you know so let's think about what we might be seeing right so there's the media that's giving us images that are and the things that you might actually see so I think one of the things that we're already seeing is a new form of narrative like VR is really shifting it's allowing us to think differently about what narrative means right it's shifting the single author perspective it is making it possible to put works like Alice in Wonderland Frankenstein and VR I mean I'm just talking about the two that I'd like to see um but essentially there's nothing it's subverting the authorial voice is something that VR is really really good at right I mean all of a sudden there's not one frame there's a multiple frames and if you're going to make a movie and very you're going to have to think about a lot of options for your viewer while still allowing them so you need to put guardrails and have a ton of options so again this sounds sort of like classes I teach but it's it's essentially about trusting the viewer but directing them and there's a lot of really interesting work that's going to be made in that historical events in VR you're going to see a lot of that I think many of you are already working on that but you know the Cuban revolution VR the San Francisco World Fair in VR scientific labs in VR I mean I don't know if anybody's seen if this is a Scottish VR company that did the lunar landing so the Apollo 11 it's sort of the takeoff and it's it's fantastic it's passive but it's amazing you know you're sitting in a 1960s living room and there's JFK giving a speech and then you turn the light off and you move and all of a sudden you're one of the you're the you're the you're the right stuff you're gonna you're walking there on the plank you sit down you don't actually sit down so there's it's always not quite real but you have the whole experience of sort of leaving earth and going to the moon and you know like that we're gonna have sort of and you already see a lot of really interesting AR museum exhibits sort of ways in which sort of immersive technology is making the experience of engaging with arts and with literature and with history in a different way I think VR and one of the things that it's really great at is allowing humans to go where humans normally can't go and it's not just about going to the moon or going under water but you can tiny tiny and become a blood cell and go through a body and you know look at the inside of a heart as opposed to the outside of a heart right you can fly you can go to space you can perform all sorts of engineering feats or just learn about engineering so it's really hard to teach engineering in 2D and so there's some really interesting classes are being taught in VR to teach sort of how the internal functioning of complicated engines works because you can actually go inside and look at those things and that gets me to sort of simulations in VR right so the the simulated teaching that's happening in VR that really is sort of the the connection that there's nothing that new about it but it's really really interesting so medical training pilots everything that's it's it's getting better every time going beyond the realm of physics again VR allows you to shift your perspective on things and once you shift your perspective you can make new findings and so like space exploration adding soundscapes there's a group at UCR that is using soundscapes as adding soundscapes to sort of a VR exploration of deep space that makes it more accessible to non-sighted individuals it is unbelievable because everything we think about VR is about seeing it and there the the sighted part is almost irrelevant because you know in space it's kind of dark so it turns out that soundscapes are a much better way to experience space than seeing it I mean in reality right if you're not in a sort of in a in a movie context and soundscapes are are a sort of I think it's beyond VR but in the sort of in the immersive realm or is there's some really interesting stuff I don't know if you're familiar with it's Jessica Brillhart has a it's it's it's an app it's not really an app because it functions in a specific context it's called Traverse and essentially you can kind of pull up Elvis right now and he's sort of like in a hologram but it's not just you're not just seeing him you're also hearing him and as you move you move away from him and the sound gets further away and she's done kind of collaborations with I think the London Symphony which is sort of combining sort of holds the planets I think with something on and it's so it's it's again closer to what Tom Wester does with kind of movement and sound and having kind of that kind of immersive so VR is really just one of the many implements in which really amazing things are going to happen smell and taste are coming just so you know I think I have a this is there we go feel real sensory it's it's a thing I'm not entirely sure it should happen you know back to yeah I mean will it make your environment more real sure do you want to smell London in the 16th century no I'm not going to talk about porn and VR but that is the part of the entertainment industry that is doing a lot of work and don't Google it but as ever people are going to find all sorts of ways to entertain themselves in an immersive environment and who am I to judge now I do want to say about some things that really shouldn't and again it's this might not surprise you but there's some things that will happen and we need to be aware of them the fact that they're going to happen and when they happen we need to be we need to know how to respond to this there's going to be a lot of historical recreation VR and it's it's already happening and it's innocent and it's interesting it's you know reconstructions of destroyed buildings reenactment of certain people giving speeches right JFK on TV right but that wasn't the it wasn't really JFK on TV but you know very soon we'll have JFK in Elvis in a hologram or the anybody seen the Vikings show on the history channel right awesome right I mean people get super excited about the it's good to see Vikings real Vikings I mean so much better than the show right because you'll be there you can look around it's like you're there and if you'll be able to experience something that you've only been able to read about I mean that's that's I mean as a as a historian who teaches history I want students to engage with it my god like finally like here's the here's the thing I got to grab them by the you know by the guts and they'll love it I need to remind you of the cognitive load of a VR experience VR does not get experienced the way you read a text VR gets experienced at a very different emotional level right even if I keep focusing sort of on what the technology like the intellectual levers are there is no control I'm very and there will be increasingly little barriers over who gets to create historical content and historical reconstructions what is going to be included in those historical reconstructions and what's going to be emitted and once VR history is out there and and mobile VR is going to put it in everybody's pocket and software advances make it really easy to upload any version of history someone's going to experience a historical event that didn't happen and they're going to remember it as if it did and it could be used for good we can do some really cool things but I think the bad in this case outweighs the good and that stuff just scares me I really that I I mean I'm honest I mean that that is you know I'm profoundly troubled by the fact that there are all sorts of outlets that are going to use this extremely emotional connection right this this ability to we are we are I mean if students will believe or not students but my mom will believe something because it's on Facebook right it's on the Facebook what happens when just you know when a 16 year old kid sees a historical reconstruction of we just honestly I'm not I'm not going to I you can all imagine the worst possible and there are a lot of purse for you know possible awful things like on the one hand VR can help us sort of bring voices back into the historical record right the soundscapes make it possible to do things that text might not but God you know technology's gotten too good at creating alternate versions and fake versions of things and again back to that cognitive load of VR right there's there's no distance right an untrained person VR I mean even I you know I consider myself to now have done enough VR I still remember that whale as if I'd been underwater right it's really hard for me to separate those two things and so you know who's alternate history is going to get told I mean I so this is my big warning sign this is the thing and again this is why we need to be part of the conversation right so that when people say oh my God why don't we make you know civil war let's do civil war battles and VR sure let's do some civil war battles and VR because I mean that's what reenactment like what is 90% of reenactment is about civil war battles fine you know you want to wear stinky clothes and fight a battle I mean but at least we all know there's people in cars watching them it's nobody you know it's very clear that this is a reenactment in a real world once it becomes a VR experience and that's all the civil war is to the reenactors or to the people experiencing it then you know anyway it's a bad idea but it's in our future that's it's coming so again I I really listen it is an empathy machine but it's also a horror machine and I think you know we need to know that if we can conjure up positive feelings in VR and lovely smells we can also conjure up really negative feelings and and and disgusting stuff and I and anybody see the Carna Jarena the the Inyarito exhibit on sort of a VR exhibit of immigrants crossing the border which she'd created essentially took it to Washington DC I mean it's it's it's it's a huge exhibit you're you're you get the cog we've got sensors you have to you have a backpack and you're walking through sand and it all sort of recreates the awful experience of being an immigrant crossing the the desert and you know the intention was to generate empathy amongst congressmen and women in DC first of all that is not the experience of an immigrant crossing the desert right that is a recreation and you know it's six minutes and yes it's impactful but then you take your backpack off and you goggles off and you drink a glass of water I mean it's it is not that and so I think you know VR is a really powerful communication tool but all powerful communication tools can be used to different ends and ultimately I think what what matters in VR is not that it's real is that it's it's not real right the the powerful lever that we get to move is not in trying to recreate reality or a version of reality it's an sort of really kind of exploring the part of VR that isn't real but that is still relatable that can generate magic and curiosity and thought in humans that I mean it's it's a place of embodied learning and we should just maximize optimize just do the most with it we can we can we can we can immerse people emotionally in many different ways and I'm just gonna just remind you like the cognitive load of VR is the is the reason why we need to be really careful what type of realities we create in there and and sort of we're better off sticking to the the not entirely real and I think you know we can make people experience things that they'll remember as if they thought about them as opposed to as if they felt them and I think that's that's the promise of of useful VR and I mean I think the road is still long we're at the beginning right palm pilot it's gonna be bumpy it's gonna be really fun I look forward to it and I thought I'd add a puppy at the end of this but I didn't because I've just you know but I think like after it's sort of drawing up the like the worst parts of VR I kind of needed to lighten the but you've got flamingos so just pull up a flamingo and remember what's great about VR because it's the flamingos it's all about the flamingo that's what I should have had at the end flamingo there we go thank you I did not look at time I have no idea whether I went over under or spoke my usual way too fast what museum or fashion type of interpretation and I've tried to like draw parallels between sort of what we're doing in virtual reality and sort of what we do as historians and sort of as curators when we're like handling materials and recreating anything like and I wonder if like you've had discussions with people about sort of those parallels of old historical fields and sort of what you do with VR I haven't but I want to tell you that since we've been talking about your project I've been thinking about it and I was sort of actually last night thinking that what you're doing and what you sort of realized and again I don't want to I'm not going to talk about your project but sort of the when you've realized what happens to what what matters to students in the exercise or within the interpretive part is like that's such a great example so this is I might just blow it Jessica doing some really cool things in VR but I think the coolest thing is she's getting students to make a series of decisions about how and what goes into VR right so it's not so much the VR experience which is very beautiful but it's the making so it's that it's sort of it's the the maker space part of VR that is really really interesting and I think that they're like pulling a lot that I mean you know I've been I'll be gone and you can type you took shit about me all afternoon but it's it is but no but you still you have to go because you need to see how to do like I can say it but again it's not the same as doing it but I think it's and this goes sort of more general beyond VR I was like people don't think about what goes into the media they consume right which gets us to search and optimization and why the Facebook is you know cool it's like that people don't think about how constructed our entire digital world is they understand it in the physical world in the analog like yeah so these are decisions that I made but the digital is just there like it just arrived and you know in a way it's flat it's on a screen it's hard to detect hierarchies right and so I think it's so part of my kind of one of the fights I continue to have the reason why you know digital literacy has to be more than what you know the the the tech vendors say it is like here you know teach your students how to write you know how to find the right file naming nomenclature very important but essentially it's how what we see in the digital comes to be is the important part and I think I think VR is going to be a really interesting place to make that even more physical because are visible because it's not 2D right it's not on a flat screen it's going to be much more like it's more like real things so yeah so yes and I'm sorry but I love what you're doing I and I completely agree with you yes we have we have to engage with this technology and start creating content yes yes but I'm also thinking about other ways to engage with and to be a voice sort of saying that this is not real or this is not good and how and what are some strategies for doing that and I mean I'm thinking if I'm just thinking about like oh my gosh that you know the library all these books all these checks so there's knowledge and and you know signing that and bringing it up but who's going to listen to that and you know what options do we have for making those critiques that will be in a way that will be heard right I mean how often do academics get heard that's a good and nobody reads citations I think we're the only ones that care about citations but I you know I'm not going to go dark I mean I think I think having this kind of a venue this kind of a forum more academics talking about it being willing to engage with technology despite the fact that we're not in the computer science department actually sort of you know bringing computer scientists into the conversation right I mean I think the next stage is having this kind of a conversation with the computer science department with the faculty that are teaching students how to do stuff in unity that they're all going to go work for you know whatever the latest game development company is and make you know four times more than I ever will like they're not taught to think about these things they're not tall told that this is important and it isn't right what's important for them to know how to make things in VR and make it fast and make it cool and make it look great it's not their fault right I mean but I think these conversations need to be sort of the same way that that medical schools now have kind of medical ethics as part of the conversation I think I think kind of thinking about digital ethics has got to become part of the conversation and and you know you can't I don't think that this is something that needs to be imposed but I think that there's a desire to talk about the consequences of some of the things that they're doing right and you know a lot of the you know I don't know to what degree it's they're sincere but sort of the the realization by some of the Silicon billioners like oh my god what did I do you know leverage that I have them they'll listen to them right they won't listen to me because I'm just a historian and an economic historian at that but but essentially just having more of the conversation just keeps keeps being obnoxious I'm good at that but yeah I don't I don't I you know I operate in a small academic environment but I think we just you know having more platforms onwards like you know like not just talking to ourselves but sort of having sort of Twitter reaching out to people I I you know we I think as academics we're not we're not really good about PR like we don't think PR and I don't talk about PR is like in terms of like making sure people know how great we are obviously but but really about making what we do intelligible beyond academia and I think this is precisely the kind of thing that does lend itself to that right but if we if we don't convey that if we're not reaching beyond it then if we and I think we worry I mean there's sort of a pressure in academia to publish right and no one's going to care who published and something that isn't peer reviewed but you have to find a way to generate the conversation that goes beyond academia and you know sort of I think the Twitter is a great place to start that but I mean again the circles are are they're getting bigger but they need to be concentric and sort of they the ripples how do you see this working sort of for the future especially for like junior faculty so I've done a lot of good back as a junior faculty member again it's working in like games and doing things that are fun being on social which I'm actually not on social media I'm actually often clean and so we're up with Facebook yeah and Twitter since 2009 thank you wow um even though most of me made a thing like so but there's this idea though if and I have a colleague uh Cara Cunean who's at UCLA she wrote a popular full for her tenure review and she got a lot of class for it not from higher registration who loved it because she went on all the tv shows yeah lots of you know lots of interest yep but her colleagues right and colleagues still seem to make snide remarks and I know she's brilliant and has proven herself with so many other well-sighted articles yep so how do early scholars so confront those academic challenges and how do you especially maybe a people of color of women and whatever set yourself up to be respected and this area that has so much that's so challenging to be respected and to not be dismissed as some of you just as popular on Twitter or somebody who doesn't do real research because we don't have that attention right so we thought the worst thing we were confronting was sort of awful historical reconstructions in VR right this is this is the real this is the real yeah we're just we're just going to be dark just it's it's hard I'm aware that so flying under the radar I find is I realize that's not the answer you want but it helps right do do your thing just don't tell the people here's the thing you can be on Twitter your colleagues won't know because guess what they're not on Twitter so they're sort of that right so and I think it's you kind of develop multiple personalities where there's the inside your department personality where there's a huge part of it that is performative and it's awful but I know that I couldn't do anything to it until I was tenured and even as a tenured woman that's oh man that that quadra of senior sort of full professors are it's it's like you know sort of undoing really invested structures of power is really really difficult but I think like if you know again going wrong staying under the radar is not a bad strategy because you know you can do a lot of stuff in social media again they won't know I think another way of using technology is to reframe it right so you're you're not developing a game you've got a very immersive syllabus yeah you use technology but it's not technology I mean it's just you know they use they have films you have film too same thing I think the gaming has all like the using games yes they you know I mean academics are frightfully are just afraid of losing the the one thing I think academia has forced some of our colleagues is the fact that it's serious right like this is serious stuff it is not superfluous it is not superficial unlike everything else in the world what we do is serious work if you do anything that sounds somewhat fun you're calling all of that into question and so yeah I I fly under the radar until you get tenure is this being filmed can we not put that in please so I've got a lot of one of the strategies I've come up especially with shoe editor because I have seen here and I think the post the post is forward and making my business to that publish work graph by really interesting I don't know so I think sometimes maybe strategizing with senior colleagues or you know proposing to someone who may not necessarily be the leading expert in gaming but someone who has a you know named in DH to sort of be the special issue editor or something and get all your friends to that publish in that special issue and that yeah is the work around right it's being peer-reviewed it's in a journal you've got senior people doing the you know heavy lifting for you and it gives everyone credit where credit is due but I think Julia is right that sometimes being under the radar is also a good strategy and surprisingly most of those props you see in your people don't even know what social media is and have no real clue what's going on and sometimes you can have fabulous public intellectual life that none of your colleagues they will have it those they don't care know about it but they're not a part of that sort of digital world so I think there are multiple strategies I love that one by the way which I think that's it's I mean maybe that's something I can come out of this that's great yeah thank you if I may do that with the problem with flying under the radar is that you're still expected by I mean I don't know what your circumstances are but if you're to say okay I'm going to do all games and then none of this none of this if I use it your institution I mean that you're still going to have to have the record scholarship you know to to stand up for for tenure right so it's like double the workload which then goes into the the sort of vicious cycle junior faculty doing twice the work and getting half the recognition so so that's a problem but even though I do agree with you I mean I'm guilty to get a start that did fly under the radar but you don't sleep a lot you know just so you know I will also say that there is light at the end of the tunnel because we've been talking about this for about 20 years now and so a lot of the people who were in your shoes when 20 years ago are now right here and they are starting to be in positions in either department or in the profession where this type of work will get right when your stuff goes out for tenure in a little bit you will find senior colleagues that are well-respecting scholars well-respected teachers to comment you know external letters on your dossier and it will look a whole lot better to your own institution so it's not completely dark but it requires strategy so that's yeah it does require a coaching plan for immersive tech doesn't have to be I you know I don't come from background working on games but I'm recently a lot of people who are doing games and are interested in how I could use them but thinking from this kind of workshops focused on colonial theory most games are pretty co-longed like imperial you know get resources get power win kill everyone else like most games are still kind of like that so I'm just kind of wondering what you talk about kind of how you think games could be useful gaming mechanics could be useful immersive tech is more generally for critical thinking yeah so so I think yes some so the games that you can buy online the games that are successful well I mean every game involves there's there's there's some rules and you either win or you lose right but not but there's also something that what makes a game fun is not the fact that you win or lose is the fact that you're engaged in in the game mechanic and and so there's that's where Akal and I met is that I mean by the way Andy says hello I was I was emailing him yesterday so the the digital zombies game no like you everybody wins there are games in which everybody wins they're games in which there is nothing to win like the monument valley thing there's like you know there's things that you need to solve but there's no losing or winning it but you're engaged in it and so if you kind of reframe your understanding of games not as something that you either win or lose but but but a kind of a kind of an architecture a structure in which there are things to solve that are in and of themselves fun to do or purposeful then you can start getting so the the 20th century history survey is is a game I mean and I I don't have a but essentially the the explanation to the class looks like a board game right there's like you go through places and you have to take choices and you you know pick something here it's got in it the only way you lose if you say if you don't play but otherwise you will pass because as you're doing this you'll and so I think we need to think about games not as as in this kind of capitalist context but more in a I mean if you read and I'm happy to share sort of game games and educational games literature on the on the shared work drive because it's it's a really interesting way in which again back to sort of subverting the role of the expert like sort of there's a theme here right so VR subverts the role of the author games really subvert the role of the expert in the expert creates the game but we're nowhere to be seen students are playing on their own they're exploring things are making decisions there's clear rules about what the outcome of some of their actions are going to be and so I think if we kind of if you if you think about a game not as something that has sort of final winning or losing but as a series of engaging processes and that's I think that's also helpful for those who do gaming in academia and not in sort of computer science departments and have to kind of justify what they're doing to their to their colleagues is it is just a very innovative way of structuring assignments so that's one way of and again I'm happy to share anything about it but it is it is one of the it is a really interesting thing when you decide that you're not going to be in the and you know and I really am like this in front of the classroom right I mean like but when you take yourself away from the podium right and you hand over the tools of the class to the students and you have to find a structure in which they'll it's not chaos and anarchy that's a game that's essentially that's the game and I can't think of anything I mean that's it's it is the beginning of sort of like really like undoing the colonial structure of academia is just just rip the faculty off the front of the room just out but we're going to have a lot more great discussion throughout the rest of the day but we are now almost through the entire time of our original coffee break oh I'm so sorry no no because we've had a great discussion and we've kept it long but why don't we continue this conversation at the coffee break absolutely thank you so much thank you you