 And Liz, I'm delighted to help those neurons glow. Well, I have the top of the hour, so let's begin. Let me welcome you. Welcome everyone to the Future Transform. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the forum's host, creator, chief catherter, and your guide to the next hour of conversation. We have two terrific guests and on a very, very important topic. We've been exploring what web three means and what it means in particular for higher education for several sessions so far. We've had a couple of sessions that look at the side of web three dedicated to the blockchain to decentralize ownership of data. And now what we'd like to do is turn to the other side of web three, which is the virtual world side or the XR side. And we're gonna do that when the company of two forum favorites, long running friends and leading experts in the world on the subject. Maya Gorgeva is at the new school where she runs a wonderful and early XR center there where they do cutting edge research into emerging technologies for teaching and learning. And Emery Craig is the current CEO of the Digital Bodies website and consultancy where he consults around the world and researches where XR is headed. They're great people. I can't praise them enough. I strongly recommend Digital Bodies so strongly that you can see a little button on the bottom left hand corner of the screen. Now what I'd like to do is bring them up on stage. So first of all, if I could bring Maya up on stage and let me just make some room here. Hello Maya. Hello Brian. Good to see you. Good to see you. How is everything in New York? It's actually been quite cold in the last couple of days. And today we are going to experience actually warming up and I'm hoping we get some spring because we got some spring flowers and then it got really cold. And I was like, yeah, I'm hoping that we, these flowers are coming back and staying and more is coming back. I can't wait for truly like the warmer weather in New York City. Spring in New York City isn't intoxicating. Maya, looking ahead past spring, looking ahead to the next 12 months, what are you going to be working on? What are the big projects and the big topics that you're going to be thinking about and addressing? Oh my gosh, this is a loaded question, especially in the times of what I see we are in transition, right? And for me, in particular is in transition. I started the X Reality Center about five years ago at the new school. I was invited to watch the center and we've just been working and focusing on immersive storytelling design, you know, creative research, but also research in ethics and social research and its impact on society, expanding all of extended reality, virtual augmented reality, I teach a course immersive storytelling and try to empower a number of faculty from all corners of the university to actually see the potential and what that brings to their field. And at the moment, we are actually relaunching something even bigger called the Innovations Center at the new school, which is actually going to house all the work we do with extended reality. But in addition to that, we're bringing artificial intelligence and quantum computing. And it's just our way to kind of have this umbrella space, this innovation lab that we'll be working with frontier technology, XR, AI and quantum. And so quite exciting, working on actually setting up our physical space to open up in the fall. So lots of work needs to happen between now and fall, but we continue with some of our projects and also dreaming big about our future. Oh, I bet you are. How many people work in your center right now? So we actually a very small team my position is one of interesting position, which is actually was from the very beginning. It's a linchpin position. I actually am working with the CIO office and emerging technologies. And at the same time, I actually have a dotted line to the provost office. I'm very engaged in curriculum development and some of other activities that usually now take shape in the provost office. And I'm a bit of a translator. Like I'm a little bit of a negotiator, ambassador, you know, kind of actually working through across these two groups. In our center, we're very lucky. We have an amazing opportunities with, particularly with our both undergraduate and graduate students coming from the personal school of design and our PhD students coming from social research. And so we are truthfully, they are a big part of our team. But being in IT also have the potential of bringing in our development support when needed and driving these initiatives. And we are a team otherwise basically usually of two to three people with a core team with this satellite team that joins us for oftentimes they stay with us to two years that makes it all happen when we get together. Well, it sounds like a great group. And definitely to me, it also sounds like a kind of time travelers from the future bringing what's next to the present. Well, we have Maya on stage. Now let me add her partner and her partner in crime, Emory Craig also coming to us from New York, I think. And Emory, let's see, there we are. And here, let me adjust the screens so everyone can see each other. How are you doing, Emory? Okay, well, I'm doing all right. As I think you know, I seem to have caught the flu or something. I don't have COVID, but I've been under the weather for the past week. So apologies in advance if you hear me coughing away and I'm drinking orange juice and trying to take medication that doesn't somehow make me woozy headed. So I'm so coherent at least till the evening. But yeah, so do you know right now? I think you under the weather is like the combination of four brilliant people on an ordinary day. Please feel better, please feel better. Thank you so much. And you know this, I get sick like only once a decade it seems like. And it's always in the spring around this time. And yeah, I got it again this week, really bad. April is the gross month. April is always the month, but it is spring in New York City. And yeah, I'm looking forward to getting out and about, you know. Well, speaking about, before 10 years go by, what does the next year look like for you? What are you gonna be working on then? Where are you gonna be going? And what are you gonna be doing? I suspect I'll be all over the world again, which is where I was in 2019. I left my full-time position gratefully about six, five months before COVID hit. So I got out the door just in time, I like to say. And as it was, I was even back then already traveling a lot, but that fall right before COVID, I was everywhere from Asia to the Middle East to Europe to all over the United States. Things have started to pick up again. So I suspect that I will be on the road starting late summer, early fall and on through and working with higher education institutions, working with K-12, which I find fascinating. I love doing that also. And of course, higher ed just sort of kind of brackets aside K-12, like that's something else. That's the amateur leagues before they get to us kind of thing. But the stuff going on there is very important, but I also love working with non-profits, museums, NGOs and other organizations. And that actually has been some of the most interesting work that I've been doing. And I suspect I'll be continuing that work this year. Because it's great when you're working in an area and you're doing something that has a real impact as Maya knows so well from her background on human rights or on cross-cultural understanding. And when you're doing that, you really feel like you're making the difference in the world, not just the students' lives, but everybody on the ground in parts of the world that can be incredibly challenging sometimes. Indeed, indeed. Well, everybody, you may see Emery in a neighborhood near you looks like in the next year. Good luck and safe travels. If you're new to the Future Transform, this is not the traditional interview program. I'm just the moderator here. I have a bunch of questions, but what's more important are your questions. So what questions do you have? What concerns, what ideas, what hopes, what aspirations, what basic questions, what advanced questions do you have for our two experts on extended reality and higher education? Are you thinking in terms of pedagogy? Are you thinking in terms of support, research, preservation, how institutions respond, the role of students? The floor is yours to ask questions. And I'll kick things off to get people going, but again, this is the venue for you to pose your thoughts and questions. One quick one to ask the two of you. A couple of years ago when Facebook, excuse me, Metta was advancing with Oculus, people talked a lot about the kind of competition between VR and video conferencing. Two very, very different ways to get people together in a synchronous way, racially distanced. Yet it seems like after two plus years, the pandemic, that we're pretty thoroughly immersed in tools like this one in video conferencing. I haven't seen a lot of people using XR. Are we still just in that early a time for XR? Or is XR is a great way of still coming up? I think sometimes the question is really, these different platforms actually address different needs. And the other part about that is access, right? And ubiquity. Now, laptops, mobile phones, ubiquitous devices, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, at least in spaces where most of our students right now, North America, Europe, where there's access to these resources, access to sufficient bandwidth in other parts of the world. That works. Now, that creates an efficiency. Efficiency are sometimes good. And sometimes it's great to be able to basically able to connect and have these five-minute, 10-minute, or even like an event like this one, a good conversation. That doesn't present barriers to entry. And that's what's happened, why people now, before we were kind of, oh, meeting in physical spaces is the best we can do. Now we all have kind of figured out that we can make these spaces work with the appropriate affordances, tools, appropriate moderation, facilitation. You do Brian so well here at the forum. And so I think this is why we crave that social connection in particularly in this pandemic, and we found our spaces and we can access them easily. The headset is simply not a household item. The laptops that required sometimes to run smoothly immersive experiences. Now we don't wanna be buffering on this and buffering in VR is no fun, no good experience. And I, if I would basically suggest this over a buffering experience in virtual reality. So what I, yeah. And so this is I think part of where we are. And we should kind of think about this as different. Again, I often times the question is why virtual reality? And that's a good way to think about why should we go to these spaces and not solve this via chat or via video conferencing or something else. And I think that's a sort of some ways to frame this question. And the second part is that the VR headset is not a household item. Spaces, comfort level is still something that we're developing and building and people are just kind of warming up to it. Young and I think age is not a factor. Like I teach an immersive storytelling class with 70 students in fall. And it is just really people coming from different backgrounds and different personalities and personal experiences enter these spaces and have different feelings about them. And so whether they're 25 or 45 or anywhere. So I think it's a, I think there are all of these things that matter when we're choosing where to meet. But at the same time, and I know some things that Emery can speak to, there has been developments. These headsets have improved. The spaces we can meet in virtual world are have been created or exists now. We have lots to desire in them, but we're building them, we're building these stages. Yeah, and I would say there's been some good learning experiences in virtual worlds. I've seen some institutions use them. I know my, even you yourself have used some at the new school, but we're still limited in part, this is my said by the headsets, but we're also very limited by bandwidth. And what it means is we end up dumbing down our virtual world. So you don't look that much better than what we had in the second life on a flat screen a couple of decades ago. And that's just because full body avatars and we will have that someday, five to 10 years down the road. But we don't have it right now for not something that can be widely used. And that just really creates challenges. So the virtual worlds we have, whether it be Verbella or other ones, they just, they are useful in some circumstances, but we still fall back on more traditional video conferencing or something like Shindig. Well, we get that live face to face appearance of you all. I get to see what your face is, hear your voices, but also get to look past you and see a little of the light coming in from the window or look at the art on your walls. And that's rich, that gives us a sense of who you are. We need to go for it. Thank you. Those are great answers to my really great question. Oh, we have a whole ton of questions I've just piled in that are really good. I wanna make sure that they get to go instead of me because that's much better. Rick Bartlett from Tabor College asks a great practical question. What would you recommend as a starting space for a small college that wants to enter the AR VR space, particularly in the realm of teaching? You get this question about 20 times a day, right? We do, but we're in this space where I hope that we get and continue to see people entering the space. So I usually say, I'm glad you're at this point thinking about it, that is great. My question to you will be, has there been anything and you can like answer to the chat but has there anything else going on on campus? Is this kind of your first entry point? Because I often don't suggest that your first entry point to the community, the students, the faculty, should be actually a social event. We kind of tend to like to talk about that but this is a technology or a medium that should be experienced. And so often times people come up with a misconception what VR is, what AR is, what it is to put on a headset, how does it work? And so having this opportunity to engage the community in a more social place, in a playground, it's usually helps a lot in then driving a conversation that is around curriculum, which usually requires that the team, the faculty, have developed a partnership, a connection, a collaboration that they can really engage in thinking about what is going to work in the context of this discipline, in the context of this course, in the context of this experience, both in terms of engagement with the content, with the teams at the top of the course as well as in terms of the student experience. And so I would say that is something that is calls for investment on both whether it's the faculty or the team that is about to support the faculty because we oftentimes, when we open these spaces on campus, for faculty, this is new to them. They, we didn't go to school in our learning and virtual reality, but now they're new opportunities. So it's important to have that partnership model in engaging and thinking and seeing examples of what others are doing or seeing, thinking through the context of the topics of the course and where does it land itself to be. So, and when I start with that, I often say your course doesn't have to be taught in virtual reality. There's opportunities in your curriculum probably that fits really well, whether it's to engage students, to drive a further deeper engagement in terms of the conversations that take place, in terms of the investigation, the hypothesis that students able to do in the more STEM fields, we already have, we're seeing some interesting simulations on the market. So in the STEM fields, you might be able to bring some experiences where faculty can see sort of the opportunity of learning these concepts, phenomena in the 3D space and the benefits to them. But from kind of like starting in that collaboration and thinking through the curriculum to basically going and saying, I'm gonna teach the entire class in virtual reality, there's quite a journey and it's very different. And somebody that goes there should be very comfortable in going there. Yeah, and I would just add to this that I think it's really important that you bring everybody to the table at the beginning that if you have an interested faculty member, you get interested students, you get IT on board, you get instructional designers involved, everyone. And it's, you know, it always struck me that back when the New York Times was doing their amazing VR project, they said, one of the most transformative aspects of it was that of course the news media industry is as stratified and as siloed as higher education is, reporters don't talk to editors, don't talk to photographers on so forth. And they said with VR, it was the first time we actually got everybody sitting around the same table because everybody had to be there in order to work out a successful project. And I think in order to do that at a higher education institution, you need to have everyone there. And, you know, Maya having her connection to the provost office, I know helps a great deal because you're all, you know, it can be frustrating, but it's that benefit of those links between multiple areas in an institution that actually bring this to fruition and make it successful. And I know somebody mentioned in the chat, student clubs, student clubs are a great way to help get started here. You may find that students are already doing this on their own, which case that's why I've seen VR labs actually grow out of student clubs. And, you know, that's an ideal seed moment to say, let's you do your own club, but let's expand this out to something larger for the institution as a whole. First of all, Rick, thank you for the great out of the door direct question. And Maya and Emery, you just gave us a small book of approaches and strategies. Rick, if you want to follow with more, but I think you've gotten a really good start there at the table now, thanks to those responses. Friends, these are examples of Q&A, you know, just a straight question that you can just type in. Now let me give you an example of a video question. I'm going to bring up one questioner up on the stage. Our good friend, Tom Hames, coming to us from Texas. Hello, Tim. Hi, Maya and Emery. I have no idea who that is. We don't know each other. You can't escape me. Hi, guys. So, I wanted to ask about accessibility and one of the issues that I have personally is my wife recently got an Oculus and it gave me a splitting headache and made me want to hurl because I have vision issues. I have amblyopia, I have a very weak eye and a strong eye. Our mutual friend, Jared Bendis, is constantly trying out 3D things on me to see if he can get them to work. I mean, I'm like his torture case, right? But I'm wondering though, I mean, I know that there is a fairly common issue with people who have certain kinds of vision problems, especially, but there's also a reactivity and mental equilibrium issue with some folks. I've heard numbers as high as 30% suffer from some sort of negative side effects from using VR. And I'm talking about XR, but I'm talking about XR. AR has its own sets of issues. For instance, in my case, you can't put the display on this side because I wouldn't be able to see it. It has to be on this side, right? And those sorts of things come up too. But I mean, we have accessibility issues across the board in higher education. Equity is an issue overall. And when we go online and we're having to deal with Zoom and Shindig and things like that, they also bring with them whole new hosts of issues. I wanted to see if you guys had any thoughts and run across this in terms of dealing with it in the, particularly the VR space, I think that's more of an issue there, but also in the AR space, if that's ever come up. Three questions. Well, I think that the, you know, there is motion sickness. That's clear. I don't know how high it is. I've seen that 30% thing too, and I've also seen less, I've seen whatever. I think there's ways to minimize it. I think as the headsets will get better, it will definitely be minimized because part of the problem, the big part of the problem is the latency between what you see and what your brain thinks where your brain thinks you are. And I don't know if we ever overcome it completely. And we may always have accessibility issues in that regard to some degree. As you said, Tom, we have them in other areas of higher education and we seem to be having to constantly address them as we go along. There have been some other interesting developments. There's, you know, some big people with disabilities have developed apps to actually make VR more accessible for people that are in a wheelchair or at different height levels, or even if they can't use their hands. So there's been some really good work being done here. Though I will say the vendors have not been doing this. These are people that have been doing it. To some degree, Microsoft has been very good about accessibility and that's because of a personal situation with their CEO. But, you know, outside of that, the other vendors talk a good game, but they don't do it. But within the community, things are happening. And for example, platforms such as Walk and VR are I think groundbreaking for the way that they will add, you know, they will make VR accessible. But whatever be completely accessible, that I don't know. And I'm not sure that that's possible. Yeah, yeah, and that's great. I mean, I agree that with certain kinds of disabilities, it can be game changing and life changing. I mean, if you have a mobility disability, then obviously then that changes the ball game for you. But then it opens up other, I mean, with every benefit becomes another set of issues. Like again, you know, you develop a new set of people who have sets of issues, right? Yeah. The blind didn't mind too much with radio. It was more of a problem when we went to television, right? And so, right? So. But I do remember Maya and I, we were both there in our early days and we did a demo at a private school out in New Jersey. And there was a student that was completely immobile and we were, she's in a wheelchair and we were unclear that she could even do it. And you know, her attendant came up and asked us if she could try it. We're like, sure, but we were just like so scared of what was gonna happen. And it was so beautiful. It was such a beautiful moment because she had an experience like I think she had never had before. And a bunch of us were in tears. I mean, not just us, but a bunch of people in the room. Like literally in tears, just watching her with joy go through an experience. So we were just like, okay, there's that downside of accessibility challenges. It's also opening up a new world for people in ways that it doesn't, yeah. And you see the same thing with VR being used in, in, you know, homes for the elderly where people are bedridden, now can't get out of bed, but, you know, people are providing them with experiences so they can go back and see their hometown again or, you know, or even their house. That's the simplest doing, shooting some 360 video and popping it into a headset, you know. So for all the challenges, there's tremendous, tremendous positive side here. Sure, I think one of the best things I ever saw in my, oh, yeah. As well. And I think that, you know, Tom, we don't have, we actually don't have an answer to many very specific disabilities. There isn't an answer. It's too early. It's way too early. The most important part is that we have this conversation. And that, like, I hope that, you know, the educators here are going to have this conversation at debt tables, at debt institutions, and there are communities now that are addressing it. But no, I think also, like, focusing on one specific answer to one specific disability is always, it's important, we need to flag doubts, but we also have to really understand how early we are in this space. Yeah, we're so early. And how important it is to be working in this space and advocating for accessibility and access. I have to say, somebody here, John, mentioned something. I'm getting my C-Lags. Now, I have a C-Lag phenomena many times where students will simply say, I am very, I get very CCC. I'm not gonna do it. I'm not gonna do it. Five students try it and they're like, I'm gonna try, I'm gonna try it. And I'm like, okay, take us, like, we do all the things, hand-holding, chair, you know, trying to make them comfortable. That is important for me. That is important that students have a good experience and it's, you know, a lot of people don't invest in that. And I actually invest in my lab in how you onboard somebody, which is critical. And then it is, it comes a week and a week after and this person, that person that said, oh, I'm gonna get CCC, they're back and they're learning the tool because they wanna make a project in that. So we have a reaction. Our students, our faculty, our staff has a reaction to new things, to change. And that is not accessibility, but there's oftentimes this phenomena, which is, you know, it kind of takes a moment to feel it, to try to navigate it, start snow and, you know, first experiences for people should be five to seven minutes. And yes, you actually build a muscle and then we can, we start kind of tapping them on the shoulder and I try to make sure my actually team every two hours is out of VR and doing something else. So I think the accessibility is a very, very important. But as we start, we also need to create enough, we have to test it. We have it to test it in different environments, with different people, understand. And that's ultimately how the solutions will come. Just, you know, they have come with other tools. Yeah. No, I absolutely agree. I mean, you have to experiment. I just wanna make sure that, you know, to me, it's, I've seen all too many tools developed where people are like, oh, everybody just picked this up and use it. And without recognizing the unexpected barriers to entry, like the one I suffer from it, I don't consider what I have a disability. It's never real, it is occasionally been a problem, but it's not a life-changing thing. You know, there are plenty of one-eyed people in the world, but it really hit me in the face, literally, with when I was trying to use it. And it wasn't just the Oculus. I've used other systems and I have the same effect. The only one that doesn't mess me up is Microsoft's, which is an AR system, right? So, yeah. Mixed in mixed reality, yeah. Yeah. That's new. But I wanna say one more quick thing before I run out, but one of the most amazing things I have experienced in a virtual environment in second life, actually, was someone built an environment where it showed you what it was like to be schizophrenic. And so we can provide new insight into what it's like to live with much more serious disabilities than the one I suffer from as a teaching tool as well. So I don't wanna overlook that possibility as well or that reality. So I'll sign off and let somebody else jump on. Yeah, it's actually been used quite successfully for loved ones and caregivers in understanding people's experiences, whether it's a different, on the autism spectrum or others, because being able to step into their shoes is a great experience about a birthday party where for us, a birthday party comes with loud cheer, laughter, it is all that is part of experiencing birthdays. And for somebody on the spectrum, that is exactly the opposite way for them to actually be engaged. But that gives an opportunity for loved ones and caregivers to understand. And I have students who are designing spaces, designing things, and that's such a asset to them to be understanding, well, how do we design better hospitals? How do we design better spaces for these communities to feel better? So yes, that's why I feel like sometimes we are going to wrestle with this. It is important that each and everyone is an advocate for our students with different abilities and create a space and an opportunity to enter. And at the same time, it's the questions that bring solutions. Well, thank you. Just let me know when you find a headset that won't make me sick and I'll be all over it, okay? Okay. Oh, and see you guys, thanks. By the way, Colm is a brilliant photographer and I threw a link to his photos in the chat. So he's stolen them for you. He's got an amazing, amazing vision. And that's also an example of a video question here in Chindake. We have another one coming up right now. And by the way, Emory, Maya, thank you for all that information on disability and accessibility. We have the founding CEO of Corsetune, the splendid futurist and good friend of the program, Maria Anderson. So let me bring her up on stage. Hello, Maria. Hey, I just wanted to add something here to the some thoughts to the accessibility discussion. We were having this discussion that one of the places I worked at about six years ago around VR and how we could use it in classes and how we can make it accessible. And in a similar time period, I was looking at some games that somebody was building and they were kind of like, you had to explore the game to like learn the things. And one of the things I realized as I was playing the game was that I actually kind of hated playing the game. Like I was tired of having to like try jumping on things and moving on things. Like I just wanted to get to the learning parts. And for some people, that's what they want, right? Like it is not fun to try to navigate around in these worlds if you don't have good acuity at it, right? Even if you have no disabilities and that's just a personality type. And so one of the things that we realized we could do in the VR spaces was to create a guided path where if you didn't wanna do all the exploring on your own, it's like the difference between exploring a museum by yourself and exploring a museum with a guide, right? So like VR platforms could simply make a guided path with stops along the way. They get you to all the places where all you have to do is press a button to go to the next one where there could be texts to listen to. There could be descriptions like and by allowing that guided path, you're not just serving the folks who might not be able to visually move on that path, but you also would be serving the folks who just simply don't wanna waste time navigating around a system they're not good at navigating in. It's a great idea. Yeah, it is, definitely. Are we already seeing this in XR spaces, in memory? I have no idea. That's just how we decided we would solve it if we were to go down that path. Yeah, I think that different people are actually, I mean, that's what I'm saying. We have to try it because then it gives creativity to both educators and also particularly people that are working in that enabling, like Able Gamers and others communities that have some solution and testing them in or having a solution where students can be paired and work, it's the collaboration that makes the experience happen. So I think certainly this is one of the ways to try things. Yes, ultimately, do we wanna be able to address more accessible issues so that everybody has truly the authentic experience we wanna give them? We truly do, but I like these creative approaches as well. Yeah. Well, thank you. That's a great idea. Maria, thank you very much. Well, I had to add. Thank you. Turns out we have more questions coming in. And as you can tell, we have brilliant people and they're approaching this topic from a whole range of areas. And now we have one that's actually aimed specifically at you, Maya. And I think, Emma, you might want to add something to this patient and your own experience. This is a faculty development question. It's from Chris Sharp, University of Florida. And he asks, what strategies are you planning to use to encourage faculty to engage with and enter the physical innovation center at the new school? So how do you get faculty into the door? I think that, you know, my best bet is, you know, basically just, you know, the footwork that I do outside of the innovation center and the engagement that happens in conversations, in, you know, in a variety of different spaces and venues across, I think, the university. But I am, I've been identified as a traffic draw on the floor that I am in right now. So I think that happens by really, you know, allowing for more intimate conversation to happen. In other words, sometimes it's good to have events and, you know, opportunities, a seminar, a workshop. Obviously good, but people are usually motivated on a personal level on understanding how this actually works in their field within that context of their course. And so being kind of able to be prepared to engage in that level. And usually people with multidisciplinary backgrounds, which is where I start to begin with, I able to do that because you always bring something of yourself in this conversation and being prepared to also address this. As I've many times said, this shouldn't be somebody's second or third job. At least for a single, if you're really serious on your campus, at least, you know, if you can make it A permanently at the beginning, just give them that space. Give them a three month or six months to start creating these synergies, to try different things, engage these conversations to happen. And then I oftentimes, you know, and I think in this conversation and others in this forum have said, students are a great opportunity, a great doorway to actually for faculty to actually glean into how this is relevant to them. And so I actually do joint events. And, you know, five years ago when I started doing joint events, meaning I'm inviting faculty and students to the same workshop, the same open hours, the same everything. It was kind of like a bit of a novel idea, you know. Faculty development happens in a format where it's just faculty and then clubs and students and student success, you know, somebody else on campus runs that. And I think of myself as a space that brings everybody from every corner. Everybody, yeah. And that's, I think one thing, but I do engage knowing who I'm going to meet. Is it somebody from sociology or somebody from the arts or somebody from journalism? I oftentimes engage in trying to bring a very relevant angle to the work they do. Awesome, thank you for that answer. I really appreciate it. Are you able to hear me? Yes. Yeah, we can, yeah, yeah, okay. Definitely appreciate it. And I ask because we're exploring something like this innovation center I'm with the UFIT at the University of Florida. There was a made at UF kind of VR lab that was in our science library and they recently decided to close that VR lab and just, you know, make the VR sets they had, you know, check out the students one of it. And now we're kind of in that post-mortem. Why did that VR space not work out and do something like this? How do we prepare ourselves? What would we do differently to make sure that it gets used? Because it was definitely underutilized. Well, that's why I wanted to ask about it. Yes, the most common question to me for every event I did during pandemic is, is the lab open? When is the lab going to open? I think you have to, you have to, you know, we have to engage with this community on all levels and different campuses I engage in different ways. Some have social networks, some they don't, some have, you know, active in one or the others or, you know, where, you know, some have posted in all of the above. And also we've also had events that sometimes it's not the right day and somehow it didn't happen, but it doesn't mean we always been wanting to open doors and, you know, always also bring like a lab assistant in the form of students from different campuses. I always, particularly in my campus, but oftentimes campuses is thinking, oh, this is the students from the gaming department or this is the students from the, you know, design department. And I've tried to actually hire and for a diversity perspective, but also because then they speak to their schools to bring people from architecture, from philosophy, from journalism, to be part of the center from the performing arts and be part of this environment and they become the best, you know, messengers, but also, you know, offer opportunities to try and that means offer opportunities in different, in different sort of formats, times and all of the above. I'll just add to this, you know, public demos can also be very effective. If you get a high traffic place and, you know, get out there and do something publicly, you're gonna snag some people that may not know about it or say, let me try this and even just some short compelling experiences. I know Maya, remember you telling me the story when you guys got one of your first high end VR cameras and you went out on the street on to Fifth Avenue just to try it out and you had students congregating around faculty, people in New York City gathering around, she was stopping traffic on Fifth Avenue and you know, it was all just like, you know, of course the students start dancing and acting out because they wanna see like how they're gonna appear in a 360, you know, high end 360 video and that was just right totally impromptu. You guys just wanted to try it but the end result was is that you just perked the interest. You just all of a sudden it's like people went, wow, we have this, there's this thing here and probably wasn't so bad for recruitment either because people walking down the street were going, well, that's what they do at the new school. That's interesting. I played the new school. Would you say that having students being able to come to your lab was key to the success innovations here? Cause some people are like, do we want students or is it just faculty to give them a safe space to try out VR or do we make this open to both types of groups? I mean, I would say do both, but if you have faculty and you know who they are, you can probably pick it up in five minutes that they're shy about this, they're nervous about it, give them the privacy, give them the opportunity to try it in private because, you know, everybody to some degree or another feels like a fool when they have a headset on if somebody's watching it because you know you're doing actions out of context and they don't make any sense. You know, it's not even a pantomime. Because of that, some people get very nervous and go, well, I don't want somebody watching me. And you know, there are labs that have set up dividers, you know, so that there are more private spaces or others where there's open or, but you know, if you have faculty that really need the privacy for just, you know, there's social concerns, don't force them into a public space. No, absolutely not. And we're doing it in front of others, even in front of students. So on the one hand, there's- And I want to say something else. Think about all these things, but also find a reason to celebrate somebody else. This is not just about the VR lab. It is not just about the team behind the VR lab. Find a reason to celebrate a faculty or somebody in the community, you know, who's tried something or even a student, you know, create a hackathon. If, you know, and then that will give you the opportunity to design, invite the faculty as mentors. There are lots of different ways to foster this engagement. And that's usually the precursor to more successful curriculum integration. I think people sometimes feel like we need the headsets. We need one faculty star. We can go. That can work with the right support, but oftentimes as soon as you have that, celebrate that work and bring others. You know, in a way, you know, when in the season in Bulgaria we have an expression that a single bird doesn't bring spring. You need many birds to come back. And that's what you need. You need to engage and bring others to this conversation. Thank you. Many birds. May birds for Florida, Chris. Thank you. Thank you for the great question. And friends, I hate to rush, but we're coming close to the end of our hour and we have more questions that are just great. And you can tell that Maya and Emory are great people for answering them. So here's one from a professor, Aaron Dambasu at the University of Canterbury. And this is a question that feels like a historical question, which is then going to play off against a future question coming up. Let me explain. How would you recommend some best practices that bring in life logging, mirror worlds, augmented reality and virtual reality in the context of teaching the metaverse? By historical, I mean, a lot of these are things that we've been talking about for the past 20 years. I'll put it back up on the screen again so you can see it. How do you bring these into the XR world? My answer in a single word is storytelling. In more deeper way, immersive storytelling and basically I think draw the connections between again, what has been the human experience with technology and its impact on us. And I oftentimes start my course with the early experiences of the caves in Alaska when people are actually trying to tell a story with fingerprints and then moving on to Greek theater and to Renaissance and all of these different mediums that have been a point of immersion in early movies and to come to this point in time and not to mention that the metaverse was coined by an author, Neil Stevenson in Snow Crash and it's important to engage specifically in this time. It's important to engage our students in reflecting on that journey, on a journey with media and then kind of think about where our technology, our tools, our platforms are taking us. And I think that oftentimes for me though, it's not that it is good to start with text, it's good to start with images, it's good to start with video, but it's really, I would say it again, it's nothing quite actually experiencing that, creating in that medium that actually gives you the opportunity to fully reflect of how powerful it is and how different it is from the mediums below such as in oftentimes video and images. Storytelling is key. Thank you. That's a great answer for a great question by the way. Thank you very much, Professor. Love this question. I mean, we can have a forum just on that. Just on that question, right. Now, let me turn this around because we have two questions about what comes next. And one comes from Professor Michael Meeks at LSU. Hello Michael, who asks, we're early in this space. What are your thoughts regarding the timeline moving forward? So I think Emery, you were talking a little while ago about full body representation being 10 years out, for example? We are early in this space. I would definitely say that and I don't even like using the term metaverse. I don't think we have a metaverse yet in terms of what everyone is ultimately thinking about. I think we'll get there, but I would say five to 10 years, but right now we're not there. Our headsets need to get better. They need to be more powerful. They need to be cheaper. We need AR glasses, which of course everyone is stalling on because really we just can't compress the technology down to the size that we want that's comfortably wearable in a pair of eyeglasses. So all this is coming, but it's just really gonna take time. But I do think that once we get consumer grade AR glasses, that's gonna be a game changer. It'll be the same kind of game changer that the iPhone was. We had portable phones, smartphones so-called before there was an iPhone, but when we first got the iPhone, it just changed everything. You know, it was everything from the interface, from typing on the glass. I remember the famous thing, there was a reporter after the introduction of iPhone, a reporter that said to Steve Jobs, I'll never be able to type on glass like I can with my blackberry on keys and when Jobs turned and said to him, you'll get used to it. And of course, we've all gotten used to it, and if we not, it just took time. Again, it was going back to what we talked about with Tom in some ways, it's adoption. It takes time to master these things. But the industry is changing fast, things are coming, but it's the old thing of, if you think it's all gonna change by next year, know it won't. If you think it's gonna change in five to 10 years, you're probably underestimating the degree of change that there will be. That's a good way of bracketing and framing this out. In the chat, Melanie Hogue from Southwestern says, in her humble opinion, students, headphones, AirPods are normal attire, and part of them, so it doesn't feel odd. So that's one thing to imagine. Yeah, and AR glasses will be normal attire someday. They will be completely normal. And I don't know how I'm gonna bike around New York City because as it is, I bike and people step in front of me because they're glued to their smartphone when they're wearing their glasses. And I don't know how people are gonna teach because people are gonna go, are they even looking at me or are they watching a movie or in some 3D virtual world while they're supposedly looking at me. That's, you know, we're gonna enter a whole new realm once this comes out, but we've got a couple years to get there. Well, New Yorkers need no excuses to be obnoxious, but second, we're the sweetest people in the world. But then this actually leads directly to the next question from Professor Meeks who asks you a specific timeline. How will the world of higher education look in five years? What percentage of online, what percentage of education will occur online in whatever format? So we're looking at 2027. I think that while institutions are all in different timelines, right? And it's just as people entering the whole XR space now and labs like mine are five years old. And I'm sure there are labs around here that've been two or three or four years in the making, started at the making center, the library, other spaces. So I think, you know, it's fair to acknowledge that for some time, probably for another decade, there will be different entry points of these experiences. I do think that, however, more and more will transition online and in some cases in virtual worlds. And I think that we may be living in a much more, you know, balanced digital and physical. And you have to really give students a reason to come to campus. I think that, you know, I think that we will go back to campus more fully. I think a lot of us, you know, want to be there. A lot of us are realizing and finding new ways that from this experience learning and understanding that part of the course can be delivered to different, you know, different mediums and perhaps only part of the course should be happening in a physical space and what this, how this will happen. So I do think that the format will continue, this experience that we've won collectively over the last three years will actually introduce more different formats between asynchronous, synchronous, the online and the physical space. So I think that some institutions will embrace it. Some institutions will embrace it in probably different ways. Some will try to make certain experiences premium. I think we're likely to see all of that and say this is a better version of the online, you know, education or this is, we'll meet in virtual spaces and, you know, we have traditions of experimenting with that. That is all good. And I think that in five years time, I think that is, I don't know that necessarily there will be called VR labs, but there will be VR labs and there will be other centers of just, you know, basically that will enable both, you know, physical, you know, on location activities as well as immersive learning. And more students will be interested who are in both traditional and online, what traditional, like what we understand that in the context of our collective experience in higher education, but in, you know, in onsite programs are likely to also not be a full semester onsite. I truly believe that, you know, it's likely that that is going to happen. So more formats, definitely more online, our institutions will take their own time and space. But I think that we'll see virtual world simulations, virtual experiences, you know, kind of competing with what we do today in conferencing tools. In the class, yeah, and in the classroom, yeah. Yeah, because we're already seeing students go, well, I can't come to class today, but this will be available online, right? Because if you're going to lecture, well, why not put it online? If I'm just, you know, if all it is is a lecture, then why am I, you know, if I don't come, I should still have access to it. And I think that's going to be one of the results of the pandemic. Yeah, and we'll have new careers that will embrace these digital experiences in a much different ways. So in order for us to have our students actually ready, we'll embrace them. And I think that there's just, I think there's lots of innovation that I expect to happen in this next five years. And it will be uneven, likely. Michael, you hit a fantastic question for us to end on. Emory and Maya, like, gosh, what a great, great high note to close on. I'm afraid we have to end, because we're at the top of the hour once more and we need to close up shop for the day. But let me ask, I believe the best way to follow digital bodies is on the website and also to follow each of you on Twitter and on LinkedIn, right? Yes, yeah, definitely, yeah. Well, thank you very much. I expect we'll see some of those careers coming out of digital bodies very, very soon. Thank you both for being fantastic, fantastic guests. Thank you for taking us much further. And thank you everybody for the great questions. Thank you, Brian. Yeah, thank you for hosting us. My pleasure, Emory, please take care. Feel better. I will try, definitely try. But don't go away yet, friends. Let me just point out where we're coming to over the next few weeks. So first of all, if you're really interested in this, we have a whole series of questions and the slide didn't appear. So let me just point out we have topics coming up of all kinds. We have a whole series of sessions coming up and everything from web three to the climate crisis and how to pay for higher education. If you'd like to look back at previous sessions, our forum archive is absolutely huge. And tonight, we should have our 300th recording there. If you'd like to keep talking about this on Twitter, just go to the hashtag FTTE and tweet at me or at Shindig or at Maya or Emory. And in the meantime, that's it for today. Thank you for fantastic questions and suggestions. I love the way that all together we think, dream and plan together about this future, this one aspect of the future for higher education. In the meantime, everybody, enjoy spring as you get it. Please be safe and take care. We'll see you next time online. Bye-bye.