 All right. Well, I think we're on time. So we'll we'll get started. I hope everyone's enjoying our fine Colorado spring day It's not uncommon for it to be like this at all. So enjoy the colder weather for a bit and It's I also think it's beautiful seeing the snow I also just wanted to start off and ask, you know, if anyone heard the news about the VR being used on cows It's a mood enhancer. Oh I'm sorry And with that welcome everyone to extended realities growing use in higher education Thank you all for for coming today It's great to see you all and it's great to get to to share some some really interesting Stories about how folks are are using XR across higher education these days Very quickly presenters, I'm Sean Burns on the corporate researcher at edu cause We Jason Webb was supposed to be here, but he ran into some scheduling conflicts So he helped create a video and Ben Salisman Also accepted and then had scheduling conflicts. So he also created a video So you'll get to see see some things from them, but they'll be presenting virtually and if you guys want to give a quick hello Hello, I'm Daniel Pergus. I'm the director of digital media technology at the University of that arena Hey, I'm Emily Sherwood. I am director of digital scholarship and Studio X at River Campus libraries at University of Rochester So just a brief agenda for what we're planning on talking about Like I said, I've got a couple videos from each of those XR community of practice members and I'll explain a little bit about what that XR community of practice is And then I'll talk a little bit about research that I and some other researchers at edu cause Have been working on for the last five years with HP on XR and really highlighting a few case studies That I've done and I'm in the process of doing And then we'll pass it off to my other presenters to talk about their things and we'll have some time for Q&A at the end So we'll start hopefully with Jason's video Welcome to the extended reality XR is growing use in higher education talk I apologize that I wasn't able to make it in person But I figured I'd send along some information of how a Circus University is utilizing XR in our Growing capacity over the last couple years Just a little background on myself. My name is Jason Webb From the online learning services department on campus as part of central ITS I'm an educational technology integration specialist. I'm also a doctoral student adjunct professor and all around just nerd So getting into XR was actually something that was kind of destined to be and I'm sure you guys have seen some of the Definitions of what XR but the best explanation and infograph I've ever found for it It's this one right here where it shows how to extended reality is kind of an umbrella term for virtual reality mixed reality and augmented reality Where we're trying to constantly bring those realities into our real world. That's a lot of realism for you so Quick little explanation of what we're getting into and how we get into it and what my research is How do we learn in XR? How do we reach the cognitive load of Goldilocks zone in XR learning and how does photogrammetry and volumetric capturing bridge the uncanny valley? What are these things mean for education and research and how do we utilize the best moving forward? And that's what my research has gotten into Over the years working with edu cause and Sean and all the other people that are part of our community of practice I've been able to decipher and see some really cool ways that we can integrate XR into the classroom Now some of the benefits that we've found through the process is how to integrate project-based work without material cost thinking about utilizing digital assets and virtual spaces how to create fully remote class sessions Where you can actually meet in virtual reality spaces and feel present in that space to possibly go where it's not humanly possible meaning going inside of a heart going to the moon going to different Planets or places that just are not physically possible for us to actually go into possibly time travel to his score historical places and events such as going into the trenches of World War one or Going to see the Gettysburg address in person in a virtual space And then how do we also minimize learning distractions by creating these different virtual spaces? So we find a lot of benefits over the years and working with our group and working as a community of practice And this is just scratching the surface of things that we've got it into I'm sure Sean will talk about some of the great things that the HP education class from the future research has brought forward Especially these articles here. I would love to talk about them anytime It was being as somebody that was a part of the group that really had Some input into XR for teaching and learning and how we could explore with the future of XR is now One of the cool things I like to talk about especially with my research is the HP Reverb G2 Anisep HMD This headset is a headset that actually does biometric analysis while you're in a virtual space I used it to be able to get the cognitive load in the heart rate of participants while they are in a coral reef And as you can see here from this video I had a reef shark swim softly over the top of the people while they were in the experience and I can watch as their heart rate Increases and their cognitive load trying to understand what it was and how it was going to interact with them as it was going So a lot of great information could be given to us through Devices like this now this opened up a lot of capabilities for us to be able to build some really immersive and interactive spaces And also to be able to measure and have great conversations of how People interacted in that space and how they felt present in that space and what they actually learned Where do we go here from here with all this technology the sky's the limit We've finally reached a point where the technology that we're utilizing as far surpassing the dreams that we used to have of Utilizing that technology and how we can use that technology in the classroom It has now gotten to the point where if we can dream it we can make it happen And we're still on the cusp of trying to figure out how we can best use that technology in the classroom And how we can create a really immersive and engaging space for people to feel safe and make it accessible If you have any questions or like to reach out to me and hear more please feel free to email I look forward to hearing from all you and I hope you enjoy your conference if you've Been in a virtual reality set, but I know seeing a a shark float over my head definitely gets my heart rate up Even when I know it's it's not real So Jason Jason's great, and I'm sorry. He wasn't able to be here to present But I'm glad he was able to give us that video and here Hopefully we don't have the reason issue Is Ben's Ben Salisman. I'm an instructional designer and VR AR Technologist at Hamilton College. Thank you to Sean and Jason for inviting me to add some additional context in regards to the topic of Extended reality being used in higher education. I hope you're enjoying your conference For those not familiar with Hamilton College We're a small private liberal arts school in upstate New York and for the past nine years I've been leading our schools efforts and researching the use of XR technologies for teaching and learning over the past five years We've started to see a growing trend of XR technologies Being used across the country and perhaps what's most interesting is that the libraries are being utilized for incorporating these technologies Here is a rendering of our First-floor renovation that is about to happen at Hamilton College and some of the technologies that we'll be discussing today Are being planned to be put into for example our new makerspace and our new areas within this new redesign of our library Some of the examples that I'll be showing you today can be found in the campus of the future XR research project done by EDUCOS and HP especially over the years of 2018 2019 and 2020 Here are a few of the examples of projects that we have been working on as part of our XR research projects I'm going to highlight one in particular that we're continuing to do which is teaching human anatomy with VR This is a wonderful example of Being able to take a program that has already created and adapt it specifically for education Sharecare UVR is a older application. I believe it was created in 2017 and We utilize it here at Hamilton to have students in class be in VR and As a test they have to open up the human body and explain certain sections of the human anatomy In addition students sometimes create projects and video recordings of themselves in VR Showing diseases and how that affects the organs in addition at Hamilton We've also seen the use of 360 video technologies being used to train music students in the art of conducting On the left hand side, you can see the actual live view of the student as they're conducting in front of the orchestra We are also seeing a growing trend of schools using Unity a game engine platform to create custom environments for their classes Here's an example of an experience that we designed in which a student can practice the art of performing Benchi As the movie projector plays on the left hand side, the student actually visually sees what it's like to produce Benchi In a theater that was actually recreated. They're able to turn pages and looked at scripts as well in Japanese In addition to performing Benchi students are also able to go through and explore the theater in space The use of 3d scanning on our campus has increased over the past two years This is partially to do with iPhones and iPads now being now including LiDAR in the devices Here's an example of a 3d scan that was done with an iPhone of an ancient vase What's perhaps most exciting is the use of drone technology to do scanning on our campus Here's an example of our Alexander Hamilton statue Lastly, many of you are probably wondering when large amounts of headsets are introduced into the classrooms Tracking and management becomes an issue At Hamilton we've found Arbor XR to be a wonderful platform Which will not only track all of your headsets so that you nothing is stolen or lost but on top of it it'll help you manage and Deploy AR and VR applications as well If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me and I hope you all have a wonderful rest of the conference So yeah, I want to I want to thank Ben and Jason for participating From from afar at the bottom of the Slide here. There's a link to that XR in teaching and learning report that Jason mentioned So you can access that and I think from there you can find some of the other Reports that came out of some of that research that began Back in 2018 It was It's still ongoing. I'm I've taken over it was it was started by someone else before I even started at edgacos But we deployed technology to 17 institutions With some AR VR and 3d scanning technology I thought it's really interesting that Ben mentions, you know The the new ways that we're able to scan and create these digital assets with drones or or even with phones now Because that's been a big issue that's come up in a lot of the research is the creation of digital assets and having to hire out to third-party vendors To help with the creation of of those assets Yeah, so the so the goal of this the that original research was to create immersive and innovative learning Experiences for students you got to see a little bit about what some of some of those examples that came out from from Jason and Ben And yeah, they put together that great report that came out Back in 2019 and then I've taken over and I've really been highlighting more individual case studies a little bit of deeper dives into exactly what's going on at a few of these institutions the challenges that they're facing the process they took to Accomplish their task and then some of the lessons learned And that's how we've collected feedback and use cases from these original 17 institutions And then back in 2020 we were really interested in Growing the community around XR and so we developed this community of practice Which is a virtual group that we met with every month That came you know started with some of those experts who'd been working with the technology for a couple years through our research And it's grown to over 50 50 members at this time and they all get together and someone usually highlights Excuse me Some of the a project they've been working on and then everyone can talk about you know roadblocks that they've been Encountering and they can crowdsource a lot of solutions and some really really cool Community discussions around topics related to XR so that's been a really fun project to work on And now it's evolving more into a a community led Community of practice, so we're we're trying to just keep growing the the group that's involved in that and on the edu cause website The connect platform folks can join there's an XR community group there and now I think that group has hundreds of members and so we're trying to connect more and more across higher ed Which I always love to see So now I'm going to talk about three three case studies This was the first one I did From a French institution and my French pronunciation is terrible So I'm not even going to try to pronounce it But they they told me that you know it they can shorten it to Lycanon So that's how I'll pronounce it and they created this virtual science laboratory You know for chemistry and food science and I think agriculture And this originally came out of the COVID-19 pandemic because they were trying to bring people back in and managing lab space time and They were having new students come in who needed to learn safety and technical procedures and But then they also had people who needed to come in and use the laboratory for actual Science and work and not not just for learning these things So they created a duplicate in VR that students could go into and learn all of the safety procedures and technical Technical procedures to safely interact and and use the the technology in the lab. It was really cool At the bottom that you can see the link for this is a link to my case study that you can read the entire report on But some of the things that I really want to highlight to you all about that is they started with the IT folks started with a call for proposal to the faculty to submit Pedagogical goals like why why would you be able to use XR to improve? Teaching and learning of of your students and I think that was a very critical piece of the process Making sure that there's pedagogical goals because there's always a wow factor around XR when you put it on it's exciting anything feels fun when you're in XR at least at first and So making sure that there's pedagogical goals and outcomes that you can see is really important and Then like I mentioned earlier, they worked with external professional partners to help develop these XR assets and one thing that they Really did that I liked was they involved the faculty in those discussions constantly so that they were giving feedback and creating this loop of improvement as they developed the the laboratory second case study was at Michigan Medicine and there You know these students with they're working in a medical facility and cardiac rests happen in that facility And when that happens, you know 15 people all of a sudden come together around around a person doctors nurses respiratory therapists and more and It's obviously extremely high stress and you know time at time is absolutely of the essence and that Tests some skills that aren't traditionally emphasized in the medical school around communication and awareness and leadership and so traditionally they've Tested or trained folks on this There's this insane expensive dummy. That's cost a hundred and fifty thousand dollars And it can do more than just this This training it has all sorts of cool features, but really expensive Or you can send people to an in-training or an in-person training at a facility and both those things are fairly expensive And so they developed a VR VR training to so that people could Go in and test on this and It was it was really it's been really successful And it provides access To even more people because you know people it's a little more accessible to anyone Even across the world they can all be attending the same virtual training and then the training is standardized So you're not dependent on the quality of the instructor and then also they're they're taking Like they're there for this project They're using the omniscept that Jason was talking about that has all these sensors and cognitive load And so they can create this analysis and report for the users at the end About their experience throughout the training to see where was your eye tracking like you weren't you know Someone was trying to get your attention for 15 seconds and you missed it so it's pretty interesting and then Promising practice, you know it Can advocate and help instructors who have these great ideas But may not know all the processes and things around privacy and security of the data and procurement And you know getting these things on systems that are monitored and and maintained by the university So I thought that was something great that they that they had they've got a an IT advocate who can help not just At the medical school but across all of University of Michigan for any instructors who are working on projects like this And lastly, this is this is a case study that will be coming up this summer at Jackson State University and They're recreating an XR experience of a of a terrible shooting that happened back in 1970 after there was some black protesters Protesting against racism at the time and then dozens of cops ended up coming and shooting up The dormitory there and two students died And it's it's a really terrible situation But they've been working in the last few years especially to to try to make some remediation along these lines and bring awareness of the event to people So they're recreating an experiential Experience for users who will go in they'll be able to walk through they can pick up newspaper clippings in here You know TV broadcasts and radio broadcasts as they're experiencing it But they're also doing some research on this. They're really trying to see how does this kind of project influence someone That as they're as they're experiencing it more rather than just a history lesson of hearing something to be experiencing it and they even have some of the People that live through the event and they're going to be coming in and and wearing the headset and going through the entire thing But then they're also bringing in fresh new students who don't even know the history of What happened there? And so they want to kind of see if there's a difference between between those two Which I thought was a really interesting part of their research and again They're using that those omnicep sensors to record all of these various things and have a clinical psychologist Interview them and talk about some things and use this data So those are some really really cool XR projects That I wanted to highlight for you all and now I will pass it off to Emily Hey everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I really love seeing all the use cases for XR And I'm not going to talk about that today So instead I'm going to talk about building a space in a program for XR in our library at University of Rochester So what is studio X the joke I tend to make is that it is not a 70s nightclub, which it could be based on the name So as the hub for extended reality at University of Rochester The Mary Ann Maverinax studio X is like a community of cross-disciplinary collaboration Exploration and peer-to-peer learning that lowers barriers to entry inspires experimentation and drives innovative research and teaching with immersive technologies But what does that actually mean and why would we build a space like this in the library? Studio X is a 3,000 square foot space in our science and engineering library And it was built to support immersive technology use across campus It had a soft opening in the fall of 2021 and its official grand opening last fall in 2022 in This presentation I'm mostly going to focus on the work that we did in that first soft launch year and what we learned from that But I'm happy to talk more later if you want to know what we've been up to this last year So what did it take to make studio X successful? I think it's really important to start at the outset of this presentation and confess that Extended reality is a strategic research priority at University of Rochester And we already had a tremendous buy-in from our faculty. This was not a case of if you build it they will come Our faculty and our administrators voiced a need for integrated and interdisciplinary approach to supporting XR efforts across campus And from there we conducted extensive user research Lauren DeMonte our former associate dean of learning research and digital strategies use design thinking and hands-on problem solving To surface user needs around the physical requirements through the space in order to develop a A vision for the program and so she created a functional program out of that We held for sure at sessions and engaged over 120 participants and what we learned really boiled down to issues of access People wanted access to space to work collaboratively that is welcoming to everyone from across the college They wanted access to expertise from staff and their peers that lower barriers to entry to be perfectly frank Our students like to learn from each other They they like get bored listening to me and they wanted access to technology But with the understanding that that technology is constantly changing Finally, and this is maybe the most important. They wanted access to community Our faculty and students wanted a space where they could connect and collaborate with each other They wanted to learn across disciplines and they wanted to be able to stay current on emerging trends and meeting These needs is what has made studio X successful I'd also like to add that access to technology and space is only part of it Access to expertise requires people Access to community requires people without people studio X is not a success So in our first year we had 529 first time VR users were up to almost a thousand which is pretty good And we keep track of this in a really high-tech way when people come into our space We asked them if they used VR and if they haven't we have them try out a headset And then we asked them to go over a whiteboard and write a little hash mark on that whiteboard It's just a simple way to keep people engaged in the space and to see themselves as part of our growing user community We also had equipment bookings from all six of our schools at University of Rochester And I think this is one of the numbers I'm really proud of So we had people come over and and get equipment from us from the med center the School of Nursing Eastman School of Music Warner School of Education Simon School of Business and of course across art science and engineering we Future-proofing studio acts in terms of technology will be one of our ongoing challenges And currently we have a lending library that prioritizes really entry-level equipment But we have been building more capacity for higher-end equipment Faculty staff and students from across the university. It doesn't matter what college you're in Are able to lend equipment to use in the space or to take home We hosted a range of programming including introductory workshops and collaborations with hands-on collaborations with campus partners like our career center We hosted a speaker series drop-in events office hours lots of lots of things going on last year Our programming is part of how we get students to build those skills in emerging technologies But it's also a way that we let our campus know about our services In our first year we hosted 23 class sessions for 10 classes reaching 294 students we had a faculty member host a reading group in our space We had other faculty work with us on our speaker series and they also came to us with research projects One of the places we really need to grow our services is in supporting faculty research We don't yet have enough students with the technical skills to meet the demands that we have from our faculty for help with XR projects, but we did just hire our first XR developer position. So we're really excited about that Um this summer we hosted a two-week this past summer and also we're going to do it this summer We hosted a two-week pre-college program for a dozen high school students from around the country It was a really successful program everybody learned blender and they you'd learned unity and in two weeks They produced a video game that they got to showcase to each other at the end of those two weeks So in our planning for pre-college We sent a survey out to the students and we were like what technology are you bringing to campus and Two two of them had laptops and one of those laptops was sufficient to do the work that they were going to need to do in this program So we have 12 high-end workstations in studio X we have one in each of our collaboration rooms We have a pot of six in the back and then we have one of our one in our staff space So we reconfigured all of those workstations and we brought them out into our learning hub And we plugged in everything and we turned it all on and we promptly blew the power So please when you're building new spaces for emerging technologies Be sure to put in more electricity than you think you're going to need add more circuits Otherwise you'll be sending somewhat regular emails to your very patient and kind directing director of building and technology Services letting them know that you blow that you've blown the power again. This was not the first time I had done this But we persevered and we ran a bunch of extension cords and pre-college started and then one morning Well, Megan was teaching blender the fire marshal showed up So we reconfigured this base again And we set up workstations on the other side of the salon and thankfully the fire marshal helped us figure that out But what we learned from this experience is we needed a classroom and that wasn't in our original functional program It turns out that this is an issue that comes up regularly when working with our college students as well They have the laptops their laptops are not good enough to do this work So having access to technology isn't just about our headsets It's about having the processing power to do this work It's about all being on the same version of unity which changes every few weeks And we don't want to have to waste a half an hour at the start of every workshop getting everyone on the same page This isn't just true for us. This is true for all of our colleagues working in data and teaching hands-on workshops It's just really annoying. We send out pre-work people are supposed to download the packages. Nobody ever does it It's having this is about not having the fire marshal show up a classroom with high-end workstations wasn't a need We knew about but it's one we have Also when you're building a new space for technology include two big screens up front You need one to show the program that you're working in and you need one to show your slide deck You need two screens one is not enough. We also didn't know that It was clear from the outset that future proofing studio X would be a real challenge One of our first priorities was working with advancement to build an endowment to support technology refresh costs We also work with foundation relations to secure a $400,000 grant from the Emerson Foundation to help with startup costs So thank you Emerson Finally we had an alum who was particularly invested in undergraduate leadership opportunities And she helped us hire our first undergraduate fellows who were really key for our initial outreach efforts and developing our first workshops And working with classes Studio X was slated to open in the fall of 2020, but there were other things going on that year And so beyond the issues that were raised by the pandemic Building supporting and maintaining emerging technology spaces is hard because things change quickly We need money to purchase new technology not once but in an ongoing operational budget with regular refresh cycles We need time to research the tech and make educated decisions about what's to support And we also need time to deal with the headaches that come with trying to manage a fleet of oculus quest to headsets Which I'm sure you all if you're working with quest have experienced And while we opted to do our initial purchase equipment at a point of need for faculty and students working on specific While we opted to do our initial purchase of equipment At that entry level so that we could really lower barriers to entry We have moved on to a model where we purchase things at point of need So faculty and graduate students working on specific projects can go to a forum on our website And they can request technology or an experience for purchase As mentioned earlier, we need more space. We need a classroom. We also need more staff space The functional program only anticipated two full-time staff for Studio X and we've already exceeded that We also need staff with technical expertise curiosity the ability to teach and The capacity to understand and support research from across disciplines. It's not a small ask It's increasingly difficult to retain good technical staff when they can work remotely and for double-pay in industry We have to do better Emerging technology spaces and programs are only as good as the people who run them Who train our students who collaborate with our faculty who build connections with our campus community? My recommendations are you add more electricity than you think you're gonna need You anticipate the need for more staff space You be sure to include a closet for technical storage because you're gonna have more tech and Put monitors and whiteboards everywhere and pay your people well So what's next? Well, we're already spreading out so we're repurposing a classroom That's next door to Studio X and we're equipping it with 16 high-end workstations We're converting one of our small collaboration rooms into an office for assistant director And we are have already added more electrical dops drops to our learning hub and we're adding more to our Our closet where we where we hold all of our technology our first XR developer is starting in June Which is really exciting and we finally have an acquisitions budget and a workflow with our acquisitions team for purchasing XR Experiences having them go to specific headsets and showing up in Alma This took a lot of doing and if you would like me to talk about that workflow at some point I am happy to have that conversation with you. It took us a little over a year to get that to work Our long-term goal is to create a certificate program or undergraduate clusters in XR But that means increasing our course integrations and that which will entail faculty learning communities and pedagogy Workshops and probably course design grants all of that So after spending our first year really getting the space and the technology up and running and growing the community amongst our students It is now time to turn our attention to supporting faculty and engaging with them more I want to thank Megan moody our assistant director for Studio X who manages the day-to-day operations And she has done a lion's share of the work in getting this place up and running She is creative organized tenacious and deeply invested in our students I could not have asked for a better partner to get this place up and running. She's here She's over there Megan wave your hand. You should ask her questions, but please don't steal her. I Also want to thank a lean Griffiths our section supervisor And also the digital scholarship team who are there to help out with events They work a lot with Megan on classes on projects So they're a real sort of jump in and help figure it out group And I'm really grateful to supervise them and finally I want to thank our past and current XR Specialists and Carp library fellows the students are what fulfill the promise in the community of Studio X They are creative collaborative generous kind and just like wonderfully nerdy Finally, please check out our website and our annual report which document a lot of the work We've done in terms of space technology and programming and we reached out to a ton of colleagues when we were starting this work And we asked a bunch of questions, so please feel free to do the same. I look forward to your questions. Thank you Hello everybody again My name is Daniel Fergus. I'm the director of digital media technology at the University of Nevada Reno and I'm housed on the first floor of the library and a lot of the things that I want to be talking about today is Examples of what we've done in creating VR in the library and some of the benefits that we've seen from that And just while I have this light up. I'll kind of come back to it later but I just want to Express that when we first started this a lot of our team was centered around digital video creation audio creation and we needed to kind of step stone our way into Getting to where we are now in the development side of things and if you look off to the far left of the screen here We have some examples of like 360 video VR applications and we've kind of progressed into unity and unreal gaming engines as we kind of moved along and That's kind of that left to right progression that you'll see here. I'll get into more details later But a little bit of information about at one You can't really understand in terms of the culture and the ecosystem that we have right now in VR without understanding some of the spaces that surround it So we started off in at one again focused on a lot of digital media creation. We have the lendable tech Service we have a digital media lab and a lot of AV suites around the first four of the library But to kind of echo the importance of the personnel and the staffing We have a lot of professional full-time staff to support a lot of these spaces some of them come from industry of both video production Audio engineering and most recently we have gotten a full-time VR developer, which is something that a lot of this development starting from back in 2017 up until now we really had kind of been growing and One of the other spaces in at one is at reality and this consists of four workstations We have an HP reverb index valve Vive pro I and a quest to just so people can kind of get an idea of different types of headsets And this is a place for people to explore virtual reality in terms of both commercially available content We use springboard VR. It's kind of like a VR arcade licensing program And the cool thing about it is you can actually put some of your own custom content if you have it at the University side-by-side with other more industry gameplay type of Applications so people can experience VR in that way. We do a lot of workshops and tours in here We also have unity and an unreal installed on all these stations as well if people want to go to that next level of development So it's a great place Library is are always a great place to kind of get your feet wet and just kind of explore and ask questions and then we're able to Take the questions from that first and tier and Third and fourth layer even sometimes in terms of the complexity for what people are trying to do So a little bit more about these projects the window to radical inclusion is a burning man basically experience burning man's a couple hours away from Reno and we had in some input some Inroads into burning man through their media Mecca program Which traditionally you're not allowed to do a lot of video production in but working with the data mayor library another library on campus and Some of our colleagues. We were able in the libraries We were able to go out to burning man shoot 360 video bring it back And this was again kind of our introduction into what can be done with VR This is a documentary that we put together as a quick little five-minute Clip to just to kind of show what the possibilities are This is following one of our patrons his name is Evan. Gatta here at cerebral palsy And he always wanted to experience burning man And so we were able to bring that to him and unbeknownst to us We also we well We captured a 360 run of like a ski run and taco and brought it back and showed him as well And it just so happened to be one of the ski runs that he had done back in his early age in his early age So if you have time Google Walking with reality and there's also some links relating to it and that's a great little documentary to follow a real tear-jerker, so Sorry, I lost my slide So that again was one of our more eye-opening Experiences to see what VR can do in a 360 realm in terms of storytelling And we use a lot of our traditional video production skills to Use that as a communication device moving on from that we wanted to have an interactive experience So this is the Reno Street art project where we wanted to be able to not only just experience in 360 But also interact with different elements and here you can see we had a rudimentary little layout of Reno Where we basically made some primitives and some ground planes and we hired some student workers in the CS department to help make this interactivity work and we documented over a hundred different spots across Reno where you can experience some of their street art and So in that same kind of a vein We also worked with the Nevada State Museum to capture the seven magic mountains Which is outside of Vegas and for those of you who aren't aware Vegas is about a seven eight-hour drive from Reno So it's not something that northern Nevadans can really explore so much So the new Nevada Museum of Art approach does to see if we could go out shoot some 360 video 360 Photos and also do a little photogrammetry work to bring back the 35-foot tall land structures that it's hard to really translate on just a regular You know photo or other sorts of imagery So that was a fun Quick little again unity type of a project with limited interactivity needed for coding but using just a If you're not familiar with 360 video, it's kind of a low barrier of entry into a immersive type of experience So that was a fun project that we Explored along as well The next level of complexity and I think one of our most joint kind of collaborative type of an effort is the basket museum and this Project came about when we were hoping to do some 3d scanning and some photogrammetry work of some petroglyphs Outside of Reno not far from Reno and we contacted the Pyramid Lake tribal museum director to see what they The galadies and what would be involved with that it seemed to be a little bit out of the scope In terms of what we wanted to do and they suggested how about doing some basket types of digitization. So we ran with that we Coordinated with the anthropology museum here on campus at the University of Nevada Reno and one of my colleagues Lucas Starmer did a lot of the footwork in terms of building those relationships But in doing so we were able to get access to some collections that were usually behind closed doors people didn't have access to these baskets and It was a great way to also connect to the Anthro 309 museum studies class So we got input from students in terms of what a digital museum might look like this museum that you're seeing doesn't actually exist It was totally built up from scratch in the yet You can see they have interactive dioramas and other types of Interactivity with the baskets that you can do in digital which you can't do in real life For example turned it upside down to see how the rim and the weaves are put together on different types of Basketry and this represents over 25 different tribes on the West Coast on this particular collection including a dots lolly That's just like a million dollar appraised basket we're able to partner with a couple other museums as well on this on this project and Also again throughout the process Being in communications and really early on talking to the different tribal councils Committees and leaders to make sure that they're on the same page They understand what we're doing and to get their input on to the museum as well Right now it's we have a kiosk in the pyramid lake again the pair the tribal museum That's just outside of Reno this part of a collaborative project on that front We didn't want it to just be something that you could witness and experience in a VR headset as well so we took a lot of these bought of the 3d assets and It's part of a joint effort with the digital collections team at the university The libraries we were able to work with our vendor to create a 3d viewer So basically same kind of a thing is like a sketch fab viewer where we have a 3d object We could have the basket where you can rotate it in this little viewing window But then also have the reference images right next to it along with metadata content So if researchers or anybody else that wanted access to these Baskets they could do that as well without putting on a headset so our latest and largest Most complex project is part of an LSTA grant where we were Approach by the Churchill County Museum and Churchill County Library. It's about an hour outside of Reno And also we were able to partner with the Fallen Pioce Shoshone Learning Center to Create this experience where basically there's a cave a hidden cave It's Archaeological dig site that was preserved the latest dig was from the 1980s, but there's a couple others Before that and this site. It's not really accessible to a lot of people It's like a quarter-mile hike up into the cave and we wanted to make it so that people can access it more And also to kind of reduce some of the foot traffic that comes through And as part of this a project we did some photogrammetry 3d scanning here You can see an example of taking a artifact that was 3d scanned from the Nevada State Museum And for the first time bring it back in a digital context back into the cave that hasn't been there in its past and we've we interviewed Some members of the tribal communities to get their perspective on this again as well It was a great collaborative project that Was an extension actually of a documentary we had done back in 2013 We were able to use a lot of the video and audio assets to kind of tell the story of this of the hidden cave and it's significance So some of the benefits from creating VR in an academic library One is just fostering community of exploration and innovation Having people come through your doors you can show off work in terms of what's possible So it's not just some dream that they come up with and it's unattainable Being able to show people just the different tools and the skill sets needed to fulfill their dreams is something that we've been able to do it has a strong relation to the faculty and students as they're coming through in terms of Providing a place to get past some of the hurdles that they're Exploring if they're trying to explore either their academic Goals or their research missions or other kinds of grant partnerships. It's been a great way to kind of fill that gap for them It has been a great experience for us in terms of strengthening community ties on a number of different levels You are able to provide access to objects and environments that you wouldn't be able to otherwise Which is a huge benefit and also just the immersive and interactive medium itself is A great way to tell different stories about what makes your area unique and be able to preserve these objects and environments and to kind of breathe new life whether it be into collections or places that Are normally not something that people can experience in the real world So with that I've got a couple links here this top link links to a lot of the different projects That we've been working on along with the knowledge center itself for some more information in terms of the space and Also a link for the digital collections that we had for the basket museum But before I go I just wanted to reiterate again the importance of having the staff in the community to help support the creation of these projects Without it a lot of this is not going to be done just to kind of wrap up in terms of So we didn't have necessarily a Full-time VR developer during this entire time So it was just a very much an iterative process and to have that passion and just the people around to kind of See what the end goals could be We just kind of iterated along the way from video production all the way to having a full-time VR developer So with that being said, I guess we can break for questions Do y'all have questions I thought it was an excellent set of presentations Oh raise wish in Mississippi State University and just in terms of actually the creativity and all the projects I mean, I thought they were excellent in terms of the horizon of Applications possible and then turned toward academia and the University my questions I guess have to do with the researcher and the researcher on the academic campus whether that has to be on the faculty and research faculty and enabling their projects and Or the graduate students in terms of actually them coming up to speed with some of these newer Methodologies, I was intrigued by the University of Rochester that there was a slide right at the end that it said Researcher speed dating and I know you didn't comment on that but I thought to myself hmm is that interdisciplinary pairing the researcher with the Technologists or how does that work and then I also wondered about all of the presenters in terms of getting these projects off the ground specifically with the researcher and the graduate students how long is the cycle from idea to Finished product to do you see it as an ongoing thing or is it finished after three months or do each Does each project have Defined a timeline that you're thinking about in terms of the Production line and then in addition just on average how many Technologists or librarians are in that Project type timeline and I'd I'd be happy to hear from any of the presenters I'll start by just saying that the timeline is always longer than you think That was that was that's something I've heard in almost every single project For from for my research with everyone I've talked to you especially as they're working with these third-party partners Getting these assets developed, you know 90 days like minimum For working with them to get these things and then you know a lot of people also recommended making sure you check their success record From the past if you're working with with with these third parties and seeing like were they able to deliver things? How long did that project take and making sure you you know how long? You might have to wait, but 90. Yeah, I mean these these are not short projects You can't you can't get well, I mean maybe some people can get them done in short periods of time But no one I've I've spoken to And then additionally Both Jason Jason knows a graduate student working with VR technology, so it's not it's not just faculty researchers Graduate students are a big up-and-coming group who are using this technology and and you know Who have been kind of growing up with it and and now? Getting getting to put it into some of their research Yeah pass off some of the other questions So regarding the timeline question That's very it's not a very much of a sliding scale in terms of what the people are asking Something as simple as like a 360 capture of an experience for a researcher that wants to do eye-tracking Might require a lot less help and support in terms of helping create that final product rather than a fully immersive world Some of it's based off of grant deadlines, too If you're attached to a grant you have a definitive kind of deadlines you have to go off of on that front But in a lot of ways, too It's kind of like you always have to ask a question when you're first starting the project Are you giving somebody the fish or you make you know you teaching them to fish? Are you giving them the fish which can also be part of the? Consultation at the beginning stages and sometimes just being able to connect the dots with other entities across campus and having that Skill set to know who to talk to and to just get them through the little humps and barriers on a consultation kind of Mode is something that the library in our realm has been able to do Yeah, I think technically most of our faculty don't just want fish. They want a whole school of fish And we also are trying to move to a teaching them to fish model So the research speed dating is a really bad title for an idea that I had so I'm gonna apologize for that at front But really I'm sure most of your faculty are the same our faculty are really siloed You know they're in and our research faculty so we're in our one and our research faculty in particular They like they got their lab. They got their grad students. They might have some undergrads They teach sometimes But they're really siloed and they don't even know what each other is doing like they don't even know what the other people in Their department are doing let alone across the library or across the university or you know We have College of Arts Science and Engineering and we also have the med center and they we have some faculty that have dual appointments But there's like all these walls that exist and Part of studio X's job was to like get rid of those and so my idea for the faculty speed dating Was basically to get all of our XR faculty, which to be fair would not fit in studio X right now We have to take over the rest of the first floor of the library but To have them come in do a five-minute pitch which is going to also be really impossible for all of them But do a five-minute pitch on their XR projects and what they need from other people And we find that this might be a really good way to not only Pair up our students who are looking for research experiences and experiences building projects But also pair up our faculty So one of the examples I have is we have a brain and cognitive science faculty Who came to me about a year ago and he was like my grad students have this crazy idea We are working on developing an XR experience where we want to test audio and visual How the brain passes audio and visual i'm not going to get into the brain and cognitive science part of this but He was like and instead of just using like a conference room space What they would like to do is recreate kodak hall at easman school of music Which is one of our most famous buildings on campus because why not? and so They could kind of do some of the build-in unity, but they can't like do a real actual recreation And so what we did is I was like oh well have you talked to our this faculty member who works in audio and computer engineering And we talked to this faculty this history faculty member who has a lighter scanner Why don't we pull all those people together and then on top of that? Here's this undergraduate student who's in computer science and has been working for us for a year and building those skills And he wants to stay on campus this summer So let's get him a research grant to do that work and he can help you And so we pulled together a whole team for them and that's what they did over this summer So part of the speed dating idea is helping people find other people on campus who can help them do their work Because it doesn't actually have to be Us giving them all the fish Also, I want to note that like u of r is a weird thing for like a weird in terms of xr Because we actually do have a phd training program in extended reality So we have a five-year nsf grant with six faculty Nope nine faculty from six departments and our graduate students apply for that a phd students Apply for that program and they take three semesters of doing different modules to learn across disciplines Which is really unique for phd study because usually by the time you're doing phd study You're you're studying this much, right? And so those students understand and those faculty understand that xr requires interdisciplinary knowledge And so they're prioritizing that on our campus Um, and finally in terms of timing so those nrt students have a their final semester is a practicum year where they build something And so they come to us a lot for that work And then we also have faculty in computer science who teach air computer interaction courses And those students also build prototypes by the end of the semester for their projects And they are also coming to studio x regularly for different types of skill building sessions Hilariously this last fall one of our undergraduate research fellows the one we just hired to be our xr developer He was taking the arvr interaction course and still ran all the skill building workshops for that class and helped design the assignment for his own class So so those I hope that answers some of your questions. Thank you Hi, uh Pascal Calarco University of Windsor Um, I'm wondering if any of you have thought about the preservation of these projects And how you might go about that Unity is It's a widely used engine, but it's updated Very regularly and as I was Um thinking about The the projects here. I thought about some of my past history Back in 1998 when I was at Virginia Commonwealth University and we had one of our Masters in creative writing students submit a macromedia flash instance of A collection of poetry That she wrote around the Chinese zodiac And um What we did there was we actually kind of filmed her Taking us through that environment And and putting that to a video And I'm wondering with these sandbox environments That's a much larger Um task to do and I'd just be interested in what your thoughts are around that. Thanks Oh, one of the ways we one of the ways that we approach it in terms of just making sure a lot of the original media that we created A lot of what's inside of unreal or unity, whatever it might be Isn't really the meat and the important part It's sometimes like the photogrammetry the raw tiff files or jpegs or other things that are a little bit less Proprietary to make sure we keep those in their initial state. Sometimes it's point clouds if it's for like 3d scanning and whatnot So that's one way of being able to future-proof it too because as technology advances Maybe you're able to re-optimize different models for a different level fidelity that you're not able to really Show right now in headsets. So keeping the original assets around I think is one thing that we definitely Focus on in our area Yeah, that's a con it's a great question and it's a conversation We've been having with the people who are putting out the requirements for our new institutional repository So we've been having those conversations in the library about what other types of Objects need to be able to be preserved. Um, there is some actually really good research in this area I can't remember the name of the report, but there was a report that came out on How to start looking at preserving xr experiences Um, actually it wasn't an edge of cause report, but it was like a clear report. I think I know there was something that came out recently. I can try to find that for you Yeah, that's a great question. Hi, annie johnson from university of delaware. Thank you so much for your presentation I'm wondering if you all could speak a little bit to how you're trying to kind of integrate and connect the work That's happening in these spaces in studio x and at one with the work that's going on in the rest of the library Well, I think it's just a natural extension in terms of An r space in the at one, for example, we'd always have a Very much a lot of consultation and resources Relating to digital media type of consultations, whether it be video production audio production and whatnot And people just kind of gravitated to our r space as a hub of information on that front And as people started to have more questions about virtual reality, whether be the instructors in particular classes and the different workshops and communities Members they'd be coming out and reaching out to us It was just kind of again that safe space without having the silos of You know the computer science department or some other places that have the knowledge But can't really find a way to connect with the other different departments or entities across campus So it's just another form of technology and a communicative device in in our perspective and What it can do is something that we revisit every time someone else comes into our Walls basically and they experience it themselves So I don't know if that answered your question at all that In our area to some degree It really depends We've had varying degrees of luck in terms of having the liaisons go out to different departments and get some of this technology integrated into the curriculum and whatnot. And that's something that we are always Struggling with certain departments and some faculty members are More willing to explore than others But uh, yeah, that's something that we're always looking into finding a way to get that more Engrained into the curriculum to using the liaisons Yeah, it's a great question. Um Megan and I spent a lot of time developing documentation and training programs for liaison librarians So one of the larger issues is that I think probably a lot of you feel this is you have like one or two people Pilot out of a new project or understand a service and start to build it out And then how do you make sure that like as we have more and more course integrations? It's not just like Megan and I really sad in a corner thinking about all the classes we have to run on the regular And so the only way to do that is to include more people in that conversation And so um, there were a number of things that we worked on Uh, Megan developed a liaison toolkit with two of our liaison librarians that had documentation about All of our technology All of our procedures all of the instructions to like how to use the space the different tiers of support They could have so if they had an idea about bringing a class in They could actually think about empowering themselves to do that, right? So where is where is the support that we can offer them? But um, and then we also We have a history at university Rochester doing cross training And so last summer I developed a mini extended reality institute for our liaison librarians and Megan and I ran that in august And it actually wasn't just our liaison librarians. We had people from our books and special collections attend We had grad students who work for our medieval library attend Um, and that was really exciting because what we were able to do is walk them through our like intro to xr workshop We show them where the resources were where they could Find specific xr experiences that would be useful to their disciplines and their faculty Megan has developed the most insane Zotero library you've ever seen So if you need a use case for a specific discipline, that's it. You can look at our website. It's on there And so we helped them we gave them time to like find use cases that might be interesting and different experiences And then we showed them, you know, we're these are the types of activities we tend to run in workshops This is the type of thing we do for our intro to xr workshops Here's how you could start to tailor that for your discipline or your faculty And then we gave them time with the headset so that they could really learn Um, it's it's not a quick fix. This was like an introduction, right? But we wanted to make sure they had all the documentation around it so that they felt comfortable coming back to us and and And having those interactions with their faculty but also with us And so we've seen an uptick in some of the ways that faculty have come to us this year So it wasn't just our faculty already were interested. It wasn't just people who had heard about us But we're starting to see the liaison librarians bringing people and also megan does a really wonderful job of with If a faculty member a grad student reaches out of connecting them back to their liaison librarians so that Um, you know, they we don't expect them to know all the technology But if they can hit that like tier one support, it makes it much more effective across our organization All right. We are over time. Sorry It's time for lunch. If you have any more questions, please come up grab us. We'll we'll walk over to lunch with you But thank you for for coming