 All right. Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I'm your host Krista Porter here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. The show is broadcast live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show and it is then posted to our website later for you to watch at your convenience. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can get all the archives. We do a mixture of both the live show and the archives are free and open to anyone to watch. So please share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone who you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. The Nebraska Library Commission here is the state agency for libraries in Nebraska and that, for those of you that aren't local to our state, and that is for all libraries, all types of libraries. So you will see things on our show that are for public libraries, K-12, academic, correction facilities, museums all across the board. We're just, you know, all about anything related to having to do with libraries we have on the show. And we have a mixture of things here, book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, demos of services and products we think that may be of interest to you. There's a lot of things out there for you to see. We have the Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do presentations, but we also bring in guest speakers sometimes. And that's what we have this morning from out in western Nebraska, the other end of the state from where I am. We have, this is when we're going to talk about virtual reality, let's get real about virtual reality. And with us we have Nate Doherty, Nate, you're all the people's right, yeah. And Christine Fuller-Genher, both from our Shadron State College. And Carl, Carl Spiker, is that how you pronounce your name? Fisher. Fisher, ah, I'm doing to get it wrong without asking. Who's from Shadron Public Library out there. And they're going to talk to us about what they've been experimenting with and doing with VR and all the fun things you see, you know, in your Best Buy when you walk by. And probably other things. So I'll just let you guys take it away and tell us all about what you've been doing. Great. Thank you, Christa. Like Christa said, I'm Christine Fuller-Genher. I'm the public services librarian here at Shadron State. And Nathaniel, we actually hired two years ago. And he came in mostly just to work in the Media Lab and VR. So he's had a very specialized job. We've had him do a few other things, but he's worked about 16 to 20 hours just to kind of build up this program that we have. And then as we were planning this, we thought it would be nice to bring in Carl from the Public Library because about the same time that we were doing some VR, they started doing some things with VR too. And we thought it would be nice to get a perspective from both the public and an academic. A little bit about Shadron, because I know a lot of you aren't watching from Nebraska. We're a town of about 6,000 people. And then the college is about 3,000. We're kind of geared towards liberal arts. We also have some education and business programs and a few other. They're a big rangeland. And a big rangeland program as well. So when we were kind of looking for programs that might VR programs that might support those programs, that's kind of what we were keeping in mind. So the reason we got into VR, we got a donation about four years ago to create a media lab. That was really the only stipulation is that we needed to do a media lab. So we did a media lab with some computers with art software, music software, and electronic piano. And then we also bought a Rift, which we're going to show you guys in a little bit. So that's kind of how we started getting into it. Our director at the time was pretty techie. And so she was really up on this. And then when she left, that left a little bit of a void. And so that's one of the main reasons we hired Nate was to kind of move this project forward. We've also made some changes in the last year or so. One of the main things, we'll talk about space a little bit later, but you can see that we're in this big room. Our previous location for the VR was in the media lab. And it was just in like maybe a four foot by four foot space. So very kind of constrained. And that worked okay when we first got the VR, because most of the games and programs were a little bit less mobile. And now as we've, as it's progressed, there's a lot of things where you really need to be moving around. And so we found that people were kind of running into walls, or they were running into people behind them or just felt very constrained. And it didn't feel very safe. And since VR can be so immersive, we want people to feel very safe and secure when they're when they're doing these things, because it is you're really transported to a different world. So we'll talk a little about space and space requirements later. So since we moved upstairs, one of the things that we've been able to do is to partner with the learning lab with our tutors. We have, we found that for us, students are really great advocates. So a lot of the tutors are pretty into the VR. And so they're great to both, I mean, they play games too, but also to show some of the programs that we have for pedagogical implications. That's another reason why we went with VR is our director at the time was also in charge of the teaching and learning center. And so this was a nice bridge to think of some of the pedagogical tools that we could use with VR, and then also have it at house in the library. So another reason that we brought in Nate was we found that students were finding games, okay, Robo recall is the really popular one. And there's a few other popular ones. We really wanted to, yeah, not a lot of educational value, cool, but we wanted to be able to find some educational things too. So that's kind of how we got into VR. And we're going to give Carl a little bit of time to talk about what why they decided to. Sure. So our director wanted to get more technology per the public library. One of the first things we got was a 3D printer. And then after that, we decided to get PlayStation VR. The reason why we went with PlayStation VR is because we're very space limited. So with the Oculus headset, you have to have sensors in the corners. And because of such a small space that the library has, we decided to go to the PlayStation. With the PlayStation VR, all you need is one camera. And then it will track the headset instead of having the sensors on the phone. Another thing too is PlayStation VR is a lot cheaper than the other options. And we were concerned about the budget too, but we wanted to get a foothold into the VR space. So we decided to go with that. Great. Thanks, Rob. So we wanted to talk a little bit, just an overview of what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk a little about the space requirements and setup and technical requirements that you'll need. We're going to talk briefly about some of the various VR systems. There's a few different ones out there. We have Oculus, but there's also HTC Vive, which is pretty popular. And then we're going to talk a little about balancing pedagogy and fun. So thank you for your patience. One of the reasons we were running late today is because we wanted to try and do like a screen chair so you could see a little bit about what VR looks for people that are watching along. VR is really like most interesting for the person actually wearing the headset, but we set up this room in a way. That's one of the reasons we have this big screen is so that other people can watch along. So they can still get some of the benefit of it. It's just not as immersive. It's just a 2D instead of an immersive technology. So we're not sure how many of you have actually seen VR components before. So we wanted to show you some of the things that we have. So for the Rift, just to show you that this is what the headset looks like, and we're going to have Carl model it for you. And so you would be facing to this screen, but we'll show you what this looks like. So you can see that we've got, there's the eye holes, obviously. And then the audio is right on the sides. And so you can adjust it on your head. And so you can pull it back a little bit and push it forward. So we've got that. Kind of goes on like a diving mask, snorkel mask. Yeah. We always like, especially when somebody is new to VR, we like to have a buddy with them because it is, especially with the audio on, it's very immersive. And so it can be kind of disorienting on where you're located. That's gotten a lot better since we have this big space, but we still do have to worry about the cord and a few other things. So it's going to turn Carl around. It's very hard to see where you are. And then you can just give them the controllers, a little bit like just a regular video game controller. This one is a little bit more involved than some of the other ones. It's got a joystick and the A and B, and then some triggers. So when you're navigating the VR, that's how you would do it. So we have that. And then we also have, we'll let you take that off now, I think. Sure. We also have the PlayStation VR, which Carl is going to show all of you. Yeah. And Nate will model that. So PlayStation VR is kind of similar to the IKLIS, except you need a PS4 instead of a PC. How do you put that on? Slightly different. There's a little button on the back where you can adjust it. Oh, yeah. I've noticed that the quality is very similar to the Oculus Rift. Yeah, there's no speakers on the side like the Oculus has. So you can either use the headset that comes with it, or you can buy a third party one. I didn't bring that here today, but that's what we decided to do. And the headset, I'm sure. So the headset goes into a separate box. And then that box goes into the PlayStation 4. And most games will use the motion controls. And it tracks using the light on the controller. Let's see if it can turn it on. Yeah, these look really cool when they're all set up with the PlayStation VR, because they light up and they're really, they're really cool to look at. We didn't bring the whole PlayStation system because we didn't think, since we can't really show you what Nate's seeing, we thought there wasn't really much reason. Well, I guess we have to be on the fifth score from this. Yeah, that's how that works. So yeah, the PS4, the main difference between this and the Oculus one is it uses a camera to track the lights on the headset and on the controls, where versus the Oculus, it'll use sensors in the corners to track your position. The thing that they have in common is that both the wrist and the PlayStation have to be plugged into a much larger machine. For the wrist, it's a big computer that sits underneath the table here for the PlayStation that's a PlayStation. Yes. And then the last one that we want to show you that we have here in Shadron is the Oculus Go. And all of these will work with glasses. For me, I find it more comfortable to not wear glasses. That's the thing with the PlayStation headset too, is you can wear glasses with them. Yeah. It is a little bit more comfortable than the Rift is. Right. So this, it's kind of going to look the same as the Rift, but you can see that I'm not tethered to anything. I get a big head. And then there's just one swan controller. So with this, it navigates a little bit differently. Mostly what you're going to be doing is kind of looking at things. You can turn your head, but you can't move around in the space just by moving your actual body. Right. But it has the advantage of not needing to be hooked up to anything at all. It's totally independent. Does that one have the audio as well? It does. It has these clever little speakers that are actually built into the face part or the eye holes. And they kind of project the sound directly back towards your ears. It doesn't sound like it should work, but it really does. It really works. Because the way it looks, I couldn't see if it had the, yeah. You can. It does have a hook up for your, for headphones. If you want to wear headphones, you can. Yeah. And so this one will actually allow people to leave. You can check these out at the circulation desk. And so you don't need to use this in, in the room. You can use this anywhere in the library. We don't let it leave the library, but anywhere in the library. And then this one, since it's a standalone, it just needs to be charged periodically. Yeah. So yeah. So we've talked a little bit about this space already. So we've got freer movement in here. You know, you could see that just having the controllers and everything, you want to be able to have a wide, a wide berth. And also a lot of the games you are kind of walking forward just slightly. And so we wanted to give plenty of movement for that. No. So over to me then. I think so. Okay. So I'm going to talk a little bit about how we actually built the ocular trip into this room. The first step was finding a better room for it. That allowed us at Oculus Rift. And I think the place that you are may have this to, I know the vibe has it as well, the HTC Vive, a program within the, within the sort of hardware that you can use to set up safety bounds around your virtual play area. So that if you're moving around in virtual reality, you don't, you can set up a warning if you're coming close to an actual wall. Our previous space was too small. We couldn't do that. It has certain minimum requirements for space. This room, we have plenty. And so we've upgraded from like a four by four space to something more like a six by six or even seven by seven area within this room that we can actually use to walk around in, in virtual reality, which makes a big difference in terms of fun and immersivity. But let me show you the room. I do, we do have a power series of PowerPoint slides that we will make sure is available after. I can't show it to you right now just because of our technology problem. But what we did, the Oculus in order to have, in order to have full room scale 3D, the Oculus needs three sensors. What we've done is instead of having them matched on tables around the room, which we did, and there's our initial solution, the problem is if those sensors are disturbed, the whole system needs to be reset. So what we did, thanks to the help of our learning lab manager, Tom Tiley, is we actually were able to mount the sensors. You can just see the bottom edge of that one right there. That's one of the sensors. The other one is mounted behind our camera here on the ceiling. And Christina is showing the one up there right by her hand. And we got these pretty cheap sticky modular tracking that kind of contains the cords that makes tripping a lot less of a hazard. You can see with the cord coming from the helmet, from the face mask. This is now the lone sort of tripping hazard. It can still be kind of annoying, but much more manageable than having four. And we were able to, because we have drop ceilings, we're able to run the cords through the ceiling where we needed to. All done for without expert knowledge and with a pretty low budget for the actual integration into the room. I think probably this entire setup costs less than $50 to just buy the stickies, all of that. The sensors are stuck to the ceiling and the wall is just with command strips. So we can take them off without damaging the wall or the pane. Okay. So, and then the last thing we did was get this very large screen. I don't know the dimensions, but you can see it's quite large. It's actually, it's sort of a Roku smart TV. So you could run a video sharing service through it. We use it as a monitor. The idea is that for educational applications, we wanted instructors to be able to give group projects to students that were using VR. This allows many of these, many of these experiences, these VR software that you can see sort of here. When you put them, when you put the helmet on, the headset on and start the program, it'll start a secondary display for anyone standing in the room around the primary user. So those people will get to see a two-dimensional version of what the person actually wearing the headset can see. And this is a lot of as an audience, like a spectator, you can see what they're seeing inside. Right. Right. And it's really amazing how different it is. When you compare the two, there's a big difference, but it's enough for, say, we had a group of biology students that were measuring stress responses in a scary game. And it allowed the observers, the students running the test to actually watch and see when the jump scare came so they knew when to start doing their recording, their data. So it's something like that. If you're using this global program, and you're touring, there's one where you can tour an ancient Roman house with lots of very helpful voiceover. In that case, you don't need to worry about jump scares and things like that, but at least there's something for the other participants to look at. And it has worked pretty well. One of the main limitations of VR is the teaching tools. And it's very much a one person, one user activity at the moment. And so I must step on the curtain. So that's a limitation, but the screen helps reduce the impact of that limitation a little bit. Okay. So we were also able to, when we moved upstairs, we essentially rebuilt the initial computer we had purchased to go with our virtual morality system. As Christine mentioned, the games have changed a lot. The processing power demands have changed a lot. And we had an opportunity between myself and Tom Tiley, who I mentioned earlier, we had both built computers periodically. And so we knew that we had the expertise, we did have the time to do it. And thanks to the gift that Christine mentioned in the beginning, we had the funds. So there are certain you can get the minimum specifications for hardware and software. They're available on the Oculus website. There are also there are every major manufacturer Oculus HTC steam. They all make sure that you can easily find what you need to run their equipment. I do have a series of slides that will be available afterwards to kind of lay out exactly what we did in terms of the specific pieces of the computer that we bought and installed. There are also several links there that will take you to pre-built systems and other sort of lists of components, updating lists of components. So anyone that's watching this that wants to build their own system, you'll have some resources there in those PowerPoint slides. Of course, you always have the option of just purchasing a system that was built from the manufacturer already prepared to run virtual reality. The reason that we decided to build, I think the biggest reason that we wanted to take that option was that it allowed us to create something that was more modular. So we made sure we got so when you purchase a pre-built system, they're going to they're going to always try to save space. That's going to be a very small computer case where everything's going to pack tightly and together very space efficiently. The downside to that is that if you know two years down the road, virtual reality becomes much more demanding on your hardware, you're going to have to buy a whole new system and maybe spend $1,500 to $3,000 on that. For an initial investment of 3,000 to 3,500, we're able to build a computer that not only will it not need to be replaced for, we're estimating five years, but if for instance, the graphics card, which is one of the most important pieces for something doing a graphics intensive thing like VR. If that graphics card gets out of date, instead of buying an entire new system for minimum $1,500, we can buy a new graphics card for $500 and just install it into this machine because we have the space to do that, because the case is built to be opened up and reclose and there isn't, we're not going to have to worry about fitting it in there because there's plenty of internal space. So my thought was, our thought was that this will save us money in the long run because we'll be able to upgrade individual components that need it as opposed to having to buy a whole new system. I think that kind of seems like the responsible thing to do in the limited fund situation. So I said, I think we had some options that were in the $1,100 area. I think it was more like three once we were done. And if we had upgraded the graphics card as far as we wanted to, we thought about upgrading to the newest, fastest, shiniest graphics card. That would have been much more expensive. We were able to make do with the one that we already had. But we could have built it for much less. It's true. We would have had to upgrade it sooner. But let's either quote that we were given by IT was significantly higher. So we upgraded our system instead of replacing it. That would have been about $4,500. So if we didn't have Nate and Tom, we probably would have done the $4,500 option because I cannot build the computer. So we just were lucky that we had the expertise and hopefully in a few years when we, in two to five years when we need to make some additions, we'll have that same level of expertise here. I think, as long as Tom's still here, he enjoyed it. So just make sure you hang on the top. Okay. So list of components. One thing I do want to make clear is that although we're demoing the Rift today, Oculus has actually stopped making the Rift. They've started rolling out their newer version, the Rift S, which does make some improvements. It doesn't need as many sensors, but you can still buy the Rift. And it's still available from secondary retailers like Best Buy and so forth. And I think probably once the Rift S becomes standard, you'll find that the Oculus Rift, the first generation will be cheaper. So this may even be a better option. But any hardware that we have is still capable of running the Rift. So if we bought a Rift S today, we could just plug it in and hook it up and everything should run fine. So anybody watching this, if you decide to get the newer hardware, the specifications that are going to be in the PowerPoint slides you'll get should still, I'm just, I'm confident will still allow you to use that hardware. One of their goals was to have people not have to rebuild their and buy all new systems. They wanted their technology to roll out quickly. Let's see. Okay. So you'll have a list of, in those PowerPoints, like also a list of places where you can buy pre-built systems that you don't have to worry about having someone around who goes how to design or put computers together, although it's easier than it seems. So I'm going to talk next a little bit about upkeep and discovery. How do we maintain the system? How do we add necessary programs to it? And how do we figure out what we need to do? I think the, one of the best options is to find messaging lists and mailing lists that you can get on, especially from technology suppliers. So I'll make a couple of recommendations. One would be a website called newegg.com that I can provide a link to later. There's also the Oculus Store itself. So New Egg is a sort of an internet version of Best Buy or a computer specific version of Amazon. The Oculus Store is obviously the makers of the Oculus Rift. They have the software catalog that you see here, a little bit like the Apple App Store. You can access that from any browser, and that's where you can download new programs, look for programs, and also buy equipment. The third website that I'll recommend specifically is an organization called EduCause. EduCause is a, oh, I'll let you, so, okay, there we go. She's bringing it up. I'm trying to follow along and bring up. Sorry, sorry. EduCause is a really, is an interesting organization. It's focused on, it's focused on public-private partnerships working to get education and technology working together. You can actually see they're showing some virtual reality headsets on their main page right now because it's the new hot thing. EduCause, we signed up for a webinar early in my tenure in this position. They're interesting. They provide a lot of good ideas. They tend to bring in people from industry and from libraries, public institutions, and educators to provide examples of what you can do with this. It's a significant subscription fee, but there's a lot of knowledge to be gained there. You can also just pay for individual webinars, which it's just one thing you're very interested in. You don't have to sign up for the whole package. It's just pretty good. The limitation of EduCause, and it's a pretty big one for places even, I know that CSC is pretty well, well, we have, we have funds. We have enough funds to build this, but EduCause tends to be focused on very large organizations that are very well funded. We found quickly that while it provided a lot of interesting ideas and a lot of interesting inspiration for an institution that doesn't have a coding department, a computer design department, or a computer graphics department, or a gaming department, we were limited in the way we could follow some of them. A lot of something that the University of Pennsylvania can do, for instance, through funding and space that they have a lot of all that, we're not able to follow exactly in the footsteps of a lot of the things we saw on EduCause, but like I said, it can give us ideas for where to go and opportunities to look for. And it was a good way to make contact with other smaller libraries looking to kind of get into boosting their technology profile. So sure version of that is EduCause, lots of good ideas largely for very large well funded institutions, but still potentially useful, and a good way to keep up with what's happening in terms of virtual reality and where the technology and the educational capacity are going. Okay, so all of these, EduCause included, but NewAgg and Oculus.com, the websites, they're a good way to keep up with anticipating if the software is going to take a jump and become more complicated and demanding. Those are all ways that you can find our research. You can find out about that so that you can update your systems or you can find, you can look for ways to continue to work in what you have. So that's a lot of high stake stuff. We're talking about building computers and money and big spaces. We'll look at low stakes next. I'll talk specifically about the Oculus Go, but there are several other examples for more low stakes virtual reality options. Again, this is a standalone thing, usually this is filtered in here. There you go. So this thing you can get for about 350, and it's totally self contained. It doesn't do the same kind of flashy computer dynamics that Rift does, but it does, it is still very immersive and really interesting. More focus on a media consumption experience than the Rift is. Rift is more focused on gaming, but there is gaming for this. So we wanted to go first of all for its portability. We can take it anywhere, theoretically could be used in a classroom across campus or another room in the library. Good in case this room with the Rift is occupied. It's low cost, as I said, 350 for the entire functioning setup as opposed to between 1500 and 4500 for building and or purchasing a computer and all the Rift components and controllers. It does have a large software catalog. That's a question with these. How many different kinds of software can you get on it? As you can see here on the screen, you have, well, here you go, there's a software catalog. Yeah. So it shares with the Google Play Store, which gives it a lot of options. It shares some programs with the Rift, although its capacity, its technical capacity is much lower. So it doesn't share everything, but it's nice to have some crossover. So I have, okay, so why didn't we do Google Cardboard as something I wanted to talk about? I was wondering about that. You're going to mention that do-it-yourself thing. Yeah. So Google Cardboard is great. All you need is you can make for yourself or buy like a little cardboard foldout that serves as the headset. The sort of paradox, there you go, you see it's branded Google literally cardboard. It's great and a very cheap option if you have a phone that can run it. And because we didn't want to introduce any barriers to patrons, we wanted to make sure that whatever our virtual reality setup was, any patron could walk into the library or student and just immediately start using it. If you have a phone that's set up that can do Google Cardboard and you can find a list of the phones that work with it probably on this website, then you have almost no immediate investment. You just need to get the app and maybe some of the software you might have to pay for. If you don't have a phone like that, those phones run in the area of like $600. You can get them on a payment plan from Verizon or AT&T or whatever, but we didn't, we realized that in order for us to get one of those phones, the initial investment would be nothing for the headset but $600 for the phone. Then there would be all the questions like how do we integrate that phone into our systems. So that's why we decided to go with the Oculus Go for a much cheaper, much cheaper option with almost exactly the same impact in terms of what technology it would bring to patrons and either if you track us at the search desk. So the other choice you have, so we're talking about hardware choices here. I'll talk about your software choices a little bit too. Are we doing okay on time? Sure. Absolutely. Yep. Yep. It's only 10 of 11 here, central time. Officially, the show is officially 10 to 11 a.m. central time, but we go as long as it's necessary to get through everything we need to and we did start a little late this morning with our technical issues and we'll go as long as it takes to get through everything you need to talk about here and we are recording. So if anyone does have to leave early, no problem. You'll be able to get everything in the archive later. Excellent. Okay. Great. Yeah, it could have been so much cooler. Okay. So talking about software now, you have several options. If you buy an Oculus Rift, this thing, your primary software catalog that's designed to work with that technology is going to be the Oculus software catalog. If you go to apps and games there on the screen share, that should give you a sense of what it looks like. Okay. So the nice thing about this software catalog is that every single piece of software here will work with the Rift. There's another option called Steam. And if you want to go there, the best website to go to is just steampowered1word.com and that'll show you their software catalog. There you go. Okay. So similar looking layout. The difference with Steam, similar idea. It's an online portal for which you can download and maintain a library of software titles. They have a full category for virtual reality. Right. So what that also shows you is that Steam is not just about virtual reality. Oculus, the Oculus website is all virtual reality stuff. Steam is all computer games. I know they call myself for that. Actually, yes. So the Steam also, because of its breadth, also is less proportionally focused on educational software. Steam or Oculus, on the other hand, seems to have a bit more of a presence of educational software titles. But again, that depends on what you're going for. We decided initially to use Steam as our primary software catalog because the software that you download onto your computer provides some options for curation that Oculus doesn't. So you can on the computer interface, not the website, but the software you download, you can lock users out of the store and social functions using a pen. What that means is that a student can't walk in and use the computer to buy something using their own credit card, for instance. They can't search for and install a game even if it's free. So they're sort of channeled into the titles that we have chosen to present to them. This initially seemed like a really good curation device to keep it focused. We realized later on that what it doesn't stop is them just going and logging out of the Steam account that we've logged in with and logging in with their own. Then they can just sort of download their own software and do whatever they want. That hasn't happened. But realizing that did make it clear that the Rift store, the Oculus store, became, in that case, a better option. They can do the same thing in the Oculus store. But again, it hasn't been much of a problem. We do make sure that we go through and curate on a regular, well, we go through and we kind of weed the software titles on a regular basis because they can download free things and install them. Again, Oculus is pretty focused on education. So I haven't seen a lot of that. But we kind of check every day to make sure there's nothing on there that we don't want on there. It's easy to uninstall anything that is on there. And that's the same with Steam. So we found that these two pretty much equivalent. The biggest difference between the Oculus store and the Steam store is that a lot of titles on the Steam store are not designed to work with our hardware. So that's another reason why we've stayed focused on the Oculus store. But again, if you make a different technology choice, so for instance, if one of the viewers here decides to buy, for instance, the HTC Vive, the one that works with Steam, this would be a different set of decisions. Right? There you go. The fancy Vive Cosmos was just on the screen for a minute. If that's the technology that you buy, then the Steam store is going to be better because everything on there is going to work with the Vive. So you have to make a paired decision. You have to decide the choice of hardware will determine what your best choice of software catalog is. And if you decide to make that decision based on the software catalog, it will determine what your best hardware is. And obviously, also additionally, that's the word, Oculus and Steam or Oculus and Vive are not the only two options. There is the PlayStation VR option, and there are others beyond that even. So next thing I want to talk about is balancing education and fun. Because there are a lot of free programs, a lot of free education ones, but a lot of free kind of teaser entertainment programs as well. This is why we're constantly monitoring our catalog here. We knew from the beginning with the Oculus that we wanted our focus to be on alignment between what the library is offering in terms of virtual reality and what is being taught at Shattered State College. That meant that we had to create partnerships with faculty. That would be our best way to do that. Obviously, we can go through the catalog ourselves and see what's being taught. But it's much more effective, we think, if the faculty are driving the software purchases. Our initial investments in this are the first program that we highlighted was actually requested by a faculty member so that you could use it in a class. And we wanted to continue on that pathway. I was wondering, do some of the faculty already know that some things might exist for their particular? I think with the... So the first real faculty interest we got was from new faculty orientation, which all new professors at Shattered State go through. And this was a few months before Nate started with us. But we showed them around the library. We showed them our media lab. The VR was still in the media lab at that point. And this professor was just a real gung-ho person. And she teaches anatomy. And anatomy is great if you can get that in a 3D environment. And so she actually went back and researched a lot on her own. She was like, oh, you have VR. Let me see what is available. And so on share care, I believe it's something that she found and she found a few other ones. And then we were able to install those and all of that. And then when Nate came on board, he installed it, we got everything moving. So she was a little bit of an outlier. And then she did all of the research for us. But it was great because when Nate started, we could just say, okay, here's the first thing we'd like you to do is to get going on some of this anatomy stuff. Yeah. Really cool program actually creates a virtual human body. Has a lot of animations. You're like, how does the pancreas work? What does it look like when the stomach receives food? It's called share care. Yeah. It's called share care VR. You might be able to get a demo. There you go. That's it. If you click that play, if you move up to the image there at the top of the banner, there you go. That'll give you a little sketch. And this is the kind of stuff you'll see when you're inside of it. You have a lot of really granular control that's showing the nerve impulses. This is one of the models that they have. I mean, if you're squeamish, it could be terrifying, but it's very cool. Probably a good way if you're an enemy student, if you're squeamish by this. Yeah. But you can see, I mean, it offers like a really interesting option aside from sort of physical models, which are very expensive, and textbooks, which are two dimensional. And there is some preliminary research out there that provides some papers of anybody's interest that suggests that virtual reality anatomy can be helpful, actually provide measurable educational outcomes. And we do have a cadaver lab, but this is just a nice supplement to that. Yeah. And it works. We've managed to get trained the learning lab tutors on it. So they can bring students, if a student's coming in looking for anatomy homework, this is an option that the tutors have as well, another tool for them. So we've attempted sort of because we feel like we got a really good outcome with that initial interaction between this faculty member in the library in terms of her recommending a piece of software that we now think is very useful. We've tried to kind of replicate that by sticking close to faculty. There's been some challenges there. Anybody else that said an educational institution knows faculty are very busy, they're very focused on their own work and their own scholarship. I'll tell you about some of the things that didn't work so well, cold emailing the department saying, Hey, we've got this great thing. You guys interested? Here's a couple of examples. No, no response. Maybe the other people would write better than I do. They would have better luck. But we did, though, have much better luck going through the teaching learning technology office here. We set up a workshop and advertised the workshop with faculty, including faculty that were already using virtual reality, already interested in it, faculty that had read a little bit about it, but hadn't used it yet, and some that just sort of were curious because I saw the posters around campus. That workshop produced a lot of really interesting discussion and actually got several people using it that had never even heard of it before. So now I think at least two professors from that initial maybe eight, 10 that showed up at the workshop have started to sort of use it in some capacity, maybe even more than two or three. Anyway, they're running it as extra credit programs and as smaller portions of assignments. So this allowed us to make sure that there's alignment with the curriculum. So now we have professors that are aware of virtual reality that will ask us to find things for them, and that will work with us to set up these projects where their students come to the library and use the virtual reality technology. Let's see. So another thing that we do, we've decided to do since that, that has also worked really well, is that any even marginal interest from a faculty member that emails us about virtual reality, we treat as serious interest, meaning that if we get a one line email from someone in the business department, it's like, hey, I heard about this thing on like the TV the other night. You know anything about that? We go and we find free related programs, we send an email with links to those programs and an explanation of how it works, how it might work for them. And I would say that you do that even with more marginal interest. So if someone's like, oh, you have VR, then they will still do that because that's like something, it's at least an opening. Yeah. And because there is serious like investment of time for a faculty member to integrate something into any teacher. And even, you know, any teacher has that they have a set of strategies that work for them to change that as a significant investment. We want to do as much of that work for them so that, you know, it makes it easy for them to integrate this new technology. So we'll look up a list of potentially relevant programs for providing links to something like this that gives them a sense of what we're seeing on the screen share, something that gives them a sense of what they could do. And at the same time, offer sort of appointment for a personalized introduction to this space, this virtual reality area. So they can come in and not have that someone is here to show them how the headset works, you know, show them how to get the hand controllers, start the program, farm cake, all that cognitive load off of their shoulders so they can just think, how do I want to apply this to what I'm teaching? And then they'll figure it out as they use it and go forward. We've had good luck with that, much better than before, Colin. So, we're moving this. And then we've also tried to take it to people a few times. So this spring we had a, or was it this spring? Yep. We had a campus showcase where various, yeah, this fall, various departments could go show what they're doing. And so this was before we had mounted everything. So we took the sensors and we took things with us, just to kind of, so then people could try it on for a few seconds and see what it's like. There was like a band and a table of food. Yeah, it was fun. So since they're mounted, we probably wouldn't do that with the big setup again, but we think that we might do it with the go. You can get a pretty good, good experience with that. And also the great thing about the go is it's pretty user-friendly and it's pretty idiot-proof for lack of a better word, but it's very intuitive and there's a low barrier of entry. You just put it on. I'm not a huge video game person, so to me some of the A and B and the trigger is a little bit more difficult. But with this, you just kind of look at things and it's just, it's just nice. You get the whole experience. If you can work a laser pointer, you can work the go. Well, like some of the things here on the go page, they do have like an education section, but also, I notice here, the travel. Yeah, very cool. The places using VR that you wouldn't maybe be able to actually travel to. Yeah, we've actually used this Zion Narrows one a couple of times. It's, you know, photorealistic. It's really interesting. I mean, you know, there, one of the things they talked about in the EDUCOT seminar was, you know, in time of limited budgets, this provides something like an alternative to actually, I mean, we wouldn't want to replace field trips with this, but if you can't bring your kids and to a Zion Narrows and you want your geology class to get a sense of what this looks like, you know, how narrow and deep and high everything is and what the straya look like, this provides an alternative to something that's really out of budget. You know, and as we said before, it's much more impressive when you actually have the headset on. It's really hard to talk about the difference between a 2D representation and an actual 3D experience. I think it's kind of a new frontier. Well, it's not that new, I guess, but it's novel. So the last part of this that I'll say is we've made a time to gather user feedback. What didn't work? Posted signs with links to surveys or please email us if you have an idea. Very little response to that. We have comment cards that we printed out and I'll show you guys these. It just kind of looks like this. We've got a lot more feedback through these, just kind of leaving them in there than with any other option. So if you're looking to gather feedback and you've set something up like this, comment cards is what I endorse. Let's see. So I'm going to turn it over now. We've talked about our setup a lot. I'm going to turn it over to Carl and Carl will tell you a little bit more about what's going on at the public library down the road. So I just want to touch on briefly on some advantages and disadvantages of going with the PlayStation 4. It's relatively low cost to the PC setup. You don't have to build a custom gaming computer. All you need to do is go to store and buy PS4 by the headset. You're good to go. You can reach a broader audience since you don't have to build a computer and you don't have to go buy a really expensive computer. You can use buy PS4. It's relatively cheap. It's around $400. The headset itself is $200. So the experience is similar to the Oculus Rift but at a lower cost. There is exclusive titles that are only for the PS4 that you can find on Steam or the Oculus Store or anything like that. Like I said, it's pretty easy to use. You don't have to be a wizard at any of this stuff. Some of the disadvantages, the resolution is lower. The PS4 isn't as powerful as what you could build. So the visual fidelity is not as great but I've noticed that the quality is similar. The library of games is smaller compared to Steam or Oculus. You're stuck with the PlayStation 4 Store. You can't go to other stores. The tracking system is pretty limited too. It uses a camera so it can't see you. If you turn around, you'll see your head of your play zone and that gets kind of frustrating. With the Oculus, you have three sensors. So if you turn all the way around, it's still going to be able to track you. With the PS4, it can't do that. The library for the PS4 is mostly geared towards games. There's not many educational titles compared to Oculus. We really invested in educational titles because that was our strategy was to align with the curriculum. But I think in a public library context, not at a teaching institution. I mean, our question is measured in alignment. I think our goals were different. I think the public library, one of the things was to showcase some new technology, also to bring some new students and new people into the library and you were able to accomplish that. Word of mouth is very powerful, especially with the kids. They'll go back to school and say, oh, the library is really cool VR. And then we'll get more and more kids and so that increases our patron count. So I guess the last thing we wanted to say before we open it up for any questions you might have is a warning. So I think with all this stuff that is new and emerging, it can be easy to get swept up in fads. And I don't know if you know this, but we have a stationary bike in the back corner in the corner because it doesn't get pretty much anything. We got this maybe with before Nate's time. And I think there's only one game that it works with. So it's cool. I'm not sure if anyone's used it. It was fairly expensive. And I think maybe we thought that maybe there would be some games that would measure physiological responses or other things that we could do with the hyper department or with anatomy, biology, things like that. And that really did not materialize. So yes, we have definitely made some missteps on the way. Yeah, I mean, I think the lesson of this bike is that just to sort of carefully measure what existing interest is and make sure you explore the software catalog before you make a large purchase. Because this is news, this is new technology, the hardware and software are developing really quickly. But it's very sales driven. So we don't have an option that's comparable to Oculus or Steam that's exclusively focused on education. So the Oculus store, this is then, this is the weakness, the Oculus store and the Steam store, they're always going to be trying to sell you the next thing. You can see this in the way that Oculus is instead of just adding the Rift S, they have stopped offering the Rift. So now the newer thing is the only thing you can buy. So this could be a challenge. I mean, if you're a non-profit institution you're looking to be careful about your budget, you're looking to keep things focused on utility and education, of course, fun can be a part of that too. But you just want to make sure that the power of the new cool thing sales drive does not lead you down the wrong path too often to spend money that doesn't get used very much. So you need a critical eye, what you need to take a critical eye and look at what you need and what you want before you jump with your budget. Start slow, don't jump in with everything. Yeah, I would say so. And I think a good way to see if this had been requested, we would have definitely purchased this if we had patrons and students saying, now we would ask, who wants this first? Is there a class that this works in? So we would explore with Hyper and say, hey, this is the thing we could buy here, some examples of programs we could use it on. Here's maybe a way you could use it in your class. Is anybody interested? And if they say yes, then we would purchase it. But if they don't, you know, then no, it's not worth it probably. We have a little fire three more. That seems like something that actually what I think about that is that someone who is trying to get in shape, they would use that and use VR to pretend I'm actually going up and down the mountains rather than just sitting in my in my family room doing this watching TV or something. Yeah, as long as you're not one of the many people to get motion, you're on a roller coaster on a bike, lots of I mean, you'd have to be careful to make sure that it works. So yeah, I think that's that's all the all the content we've prepared. You guys as a we would love to turn it over for questions. If anybody has any questions, type them into your questions section of your GoToWebinar interface. It looks like people stuck around with us even though we've gone a little over time. We'll do whatever we need you to get will stay as long as you need to get through any questions or anything else that Nate and Christina and Carl want to share. I did myself once test out the I think it was a rift last year the year before at an event that I was at at a meeting and it was very interesting. It was luckily I guess I don't get motion sickness. I didn't have any issues with that when I was in the headset. But it was interesting because you're talking about having this space and that made me think of that experience and my experience that I was very concerned about well if I walk over to that thing I see am I going to walk bump into somebody or something. I was kind of you kind of are thinking about looking at what you're seeing and what else is in this room around me and as a weird kind of dichotomy there of I don't want I want to go see that but I don't want to bump into something. Well yeah I was going to say with the with the Oculus it has a virtual boundary so you know exactly how far you're able to go. I think I don't like about the PS4 is it doesn't have that so you kind of need somebody else there to say hey you're going a little bit too far you're going to bump into something. Yeah that's something I really wish the PlayStation 4 VR had. They didn't have any of those I didn't have extra things like sensor setup it was just a here have a quickie experience put the headset on and but there's people there's most people they're running the thing you know so yeah. Yeah the virtual boundary is one of the main reasons why we moved up here I think I mentioned this earlier but it has a minimum space requirement it can't be smaller than a certain amount. Now we can use it because we have this bigger room. What it does is as you're moving around in whatever program you're using once you get to that virtual boundary it just like shows up like a big neon green fence basically. Visual only but it's a vision it's a strong visual cue that you're reaching the edge of the safe playable area right and you can determine what the dimensions and exact shape of that boundary are when you set up the sensors so you know it's pretty customizable within certain that it can't be larger than a certain amount it can't be smaller than a certain amount but you have a lot of flexibility in there so we have for instance seating in this in this VR space and when we set up the virtual boundary made sure that it doesn't cross into the areas where there are chairs you know so if you're moving close to where a spectator might be sitting you're going to know that as a user. Yeah and I think it's pretty good I mean we still encourage people for the first time to have someone here with them beyond the sort of how do we negotiate real space and virtual space there is also there's just the immersion is so strong a lot of people will when they pull the headset off for instance one of the most common experiences is oh I thought I was facing a different direction you know I thought it was facing that way but I'm facing over here and it's real as I had turned in real life and and another reason I have a buddy is is because of the the cord you know you can see it here a little relief they're not wireless devices right and you can buy them they they exist now but they're they're they're expensive add-ons I think the industry is going in that direction though and at some point that will be the standard probably you know two or three years but it's pretty easy to manage you know you're not moving around in a huge space and it's you can feel where the court is on you so as long as you're cognizant of that as a user it's not too bad and it's pretty long so yeah you have to work some to get tripped on it but it is possible yeah yeah um I do have a question for Carl um at the public library um have done any um what kind of programs or programming have you done related to it using the the PlayStation if you're at the library I mean obviously you have it available but if you've done any specific programs or events related to it so we have our regular VR night and we have enough the first and third Tuesday of each month um the only program that we've done I would say is our tech petting zoo where we had all over our new tech on display where people try it out one thing I'm thinking about doing is they have a Apollo 11 of VR um kind of experience oh and 50th anniversary is coming up very soon so I was trying to figure out a way to integrate that into into that experience and also the children's reading program right the summer reading program this year is a universe of stories because of the Apollo of anniversary yeah so I'm working with the children's librarian to integrate that so there's an Apollo 11 there's something that's part of PlayStation or is it some other software it's on the PlayStation store I believe it's on the steam store as well I think it's on the ocular store as well yeah you have a search over here hey look Apollo 11 VR yeah often if you have an off yeah it's good I mean that's that's the big danger of the steam store is every once in a while they're like deep discounts you kind of like spending more than you were anyway don't even want to their next big sale is no often you'll see if there's a non-profit or educational institution backing an event like that you'll see that's when you see a program that exists on almost all the platforms because then you have you have a larger organization funding a spread that kind of covers as much ground as possible sure because they do I mean the the software has to be written differently for for different programs yeah and as you can see on this one the developer and publisher is something called immersive VR education limited yeah right so all right well it doesn't look like there's any other questions that came in so I think maybe we will wrap it up to our you know for the for this show if any of you guys do have questions you do know where you guys can all google a shattered state college and shattered public library and find everybody to ask them more questions do you guys have any last words anything else you want to share before we do uh for this morning just that there's a really cool powerpoint I set a very informational powerpoint slide that didn't make it that I will make sure you have that any especially interesting for anyone looking at actually getting into this technology bringing it to their to their institution that should be made it with utility in mind so hopefully someone will get some use out of it yeah yeah um but we'll have that available when the archive goes up I'll put it in there so you guys just email that to me when you're done with this and we'll get it up there this afternoon okay thank you very much thank you thank you thank you everyone for attending thank you uh natin and uh christine and carl this is this is great to learn about I really want to try more of the virtual reality I did like it when I tried it out it's fun really interesting yeah happens to be around chadrin noreska you're welcome to come out and experience it in person first is the library see all the the yeah not the hard to get out that way a lot um but I have been out there quite a few times myself yes well next time all right so so that will wrap it up for today's show um as I said we do record the show and it is being recorded and it will be here on our um a website our encompass live website um if you do google encompass live or use your search engine of choice so far we're the only thing called that out there so hopefully nothing else will ever call themselves that um we have our upcoming shows here but our archives are right underneath the list of upcoming shows there's a link to our archives most recent one is that we on the top of the list today's should be available by the end of the day today um what we post our recordings to the Nebraska library commission's youtube channel so the video will be there and then the slides that nat will send to me will be included as well as you have access to both of those uh we will um everyone who attended live this morning and register for today's show will get an email from me letting you know when it's ready and I'll also let you know here while we're on the archive page we do have a search feature here you can search our entire archives or just the most recent 12 months the most recent year this is because encompass live has this is our with originally started in January 2009 uh a little over 10 years ago so we do have our full entire archive here of every show we've ever done uh we are librarians so we save things at archive for historical purposes so uh when you are searching our archives as I said you can look for recent things you don't really have to date information but if you just want to know anything we've done pay attention when you do watch an archive they're all dated so you can find out when that show is originally broadcast some of our older shows may be the information may not be good anymore the website might not exist anymore links might be broken and the service or program we're talking about may have a stopped or you know morphed into something else but just pay attention to the date when you're there in our archives so that will be for our archive uh I hope you join us next week when our topic is providing passports at your library uh this is something we started doing here the Nebraska library commission it's something that libraries can do you can work with the passport agency at the United States and they will get you set up for this we're going to show how the commission has done it how we got started we're doing it for less little less than a year um and you can actually make a little money off of it a little income so that will be for next week's show please just sign up for that any of our other ones um Encompass Live is also on Facebook you can see our Facebook links here this is our Facebook page we've put notifications up here of when new shows are coming up here's a reminder to log in for today's show when our recordings are available and ready we post on here so if you are a big Facebook user give us a like over there and you'll get notified about when things are happening so other than that that wraps up today's show thank you everyone for being here and hopefully we'll see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye!