 Hey everybody, Jesse Schell here, very glad to be here today. I've been doing VR for years, first time I've given a talk in VR, so that's pretty exciting. So what I was going to talk about today is going to talk about educational VR games. I've been working in VR a long time. I started back in 1992 at Carnegie Mellon. After that, I was working at the Disney Virtual Reality Studio in the 90s and then I started teaching at Carnegie Mellon, teaching a Building Virtual Worlds class. And I also run a video game studio called Shell Games, where we've done an awful lot of virtual reality games. Some of our best known ones are entertainment games like I Expect You to Die and Until You Fall. But today I'm going to talk more about educational VR games that we've had experience with. We've produced several different ones to this point. I guess for different main ones I'm going to talk about today. And there's an awful lot to say about educational VR games. We've been learning a lot of lessons as we've been doing this. So a lot of people ask questions, you know, really is VR really ready for education? Because aren't there meaningful problems like motion sickness can be a real problem? So far, I would say motion sickness with well-designed experiences is something that you don't have to worry about, but they have to be well-designed experiences. Now, a lot of people say, well, wait, isn't it too expensive? Because obviously, you know, VR is kind of high tech and potentially very expensive. But of course, as many of you know, I'm sure many of you are checking it out right now, probably wearing it at this moment. The Oculus Quest system has really made a major breakthrough in terms of platform. Now we have a system that is under $400, requires no wires, requires no PC, requires no phones. And that I think is going to be the huge breakthrough for the educational market. Already, we're seeing just the accessibility of that is it's really exploding in terms of mass market popularity. And I think we're going to see that next move into the realm of education. But then you still have the question of hygiene, which has always been an issue, but is now kind of in the age of the pandemic is more of an issue than ever. If you're talking about people sharing headsets in a school environment, that's a real thing that you have to contend with. But even that, there are solutions for there are things like the clean box, which is a relatively inexpensive system that uses ultraviolet light to destroy viruses and bacteria inside your headsets. We use these at the studio when we have headsets that are shared. And when we go to conferences or trade shows where we have to use a VR headset in a public place. Of course, obviously the pandemic makes this a little different. But when things get back to normal, hygiene is getting manageable for shared headsets. But then you got the question of are schools themselves actually ready? Because some of the things we know about schools is they tend to be very slow to adopt new technology. That's just how it is with schools. It's part of how they operate. And they're slow for good reasons, right? They can't be adopting every new thing that comes along because they need things that work. But because schools are slow to adopt new technologies, I mean, think about when was television invented, right? The 1940s, when did television come into schools? Maybe around the 1980s. So it took about 40 years for television to kind of make that breakthrough. Think about when the internet first showed up and then think about when it started making a difference in schools. A lot of people would argue that even now we're still the television still catching. I mean, education is still catching up with where the internet was in the 90s. And so I don't think we should expect virtual reality to go go streaming into the schools. But it is something that is starting to happen. So in terms of making educational VR experiences, I'm going to give a few tips today. And the first one is you want to focus on the body. A lot of people think of virtual reality as an experience for the mind and experience for the eyes. But really, virtual reality is an experience that's all about the body. It lets you bring your body into a computer simulation. And so that means that when you are thinking about experiences that are going to make sense for it, you want to think about things that involve the body. And this is all about the sense of presence. People who do VR all the time, they're familiar with this idea. But I think a lot of people forget, even if you're familiar with it, even if you've experienced it, it doesn't always mean that you really get how important it is. The idea of presence is that feeling of actually being in a space and in a place, right? Because that's the magic that VR brings. It lets you feel like you're actually in a place that you are not. And there's real power in that. That can be a very strong experience. We very often see people in VR accidentally lean against imaginary objects. And they, of course, they know intellectually those objects aren't real, but something inside their body believes the illusion so much that they're actually willing to treat them as if they're physical objects. This doesn't happen with television or other flat media. And part of that is using your hands. A big part of the way presence happens is your ability to reach into the world and grab things with your hands. And so making experiences where using your hands actually matters is important. So we created something called hollow lab champions. This is a chemistry lab experience. And because we were thinking about what what kind of experiences could like would not be possible without VR. And we started thinking about education. We started thinking about chemistry labs because what you do in chemistry labs is so oriented towards just being physical, learning how to properly manipulate glassware, learning, you know, that the fact that when you look at a graduated cylinder and you're trying to measure it, you actually have to bend down so that you can see where it is. Your body is very involved. And so we thought that this would be a good way to to bring your body into the lab. And so I'll show you a little trailer of it right here. The traditional chemistry lab finally has a modern companion developed with input from chemistry teachers. Hollow Lab Champions is an immersive, safe and entertaining environment that makes mastering lab skills fun. As game show contestants, players can perform a variety of lab challenges leading to a showstopping final lab or in practice mode, they can hone their skills on specific tasks. Players are scored on accuracy and safety as they perform work that prepares them for success in a real lab. Hollow Lab Champions is the chemistry lab companion you've been waiting for. Right. So yeah, you can see how that worked. That that was something that the both students and teachers found really engaging and really exciting to be able to actually be in the chemistry lab and learn those real skills. So hands are important and having your end, that's that's part of what you want to focus on. Experiences that use your hands, but also experiences where place really matters. That there's a team that made an exciting experience that's all about being inside the Anne Frank House. Now, my whole life, I've heard stories from people who've actually visited the real life Anne Frank House and they often come away talking about how influential it was and how the feeling of being in there and being in that place really made them understand the situation in a way they never had before. And the same thing is true in the VR experience. The VR experience is is very it really affects people because there's something about being in that place and in that situation that gives an understanding that reading about it, watching a video. It's just not going to make you understand. So this is the thing to think about. What are places that are going to transform people in a meaningful way? Because VR is good at putting you in places. Another thing to think about is being near another person. We have a lot going on in our heads. It's all about dealing with the feeling of being near another person. We have a we have a special nucleus in our in our brains that is all about that feeling of when something comes closer than arms reach to you, right? If you're if you're sitting next to another person and like someone puts their hand like into your personal space, you can feel that part of your brain wake up. There's something very real about being near other people. And one great experience was created by some Carnegie Mellon students and experience called injustice that was all about confronting situations of police brutality and by actually putting you in the situations where you have to deal and decide what are you going to say? What are you going to do? And it's one thing to read about it. One thing to hear about another thing to be there and have to make decisions on the fly is very memorable and does a great job at promoting conversations. And then, of course, the idea of being another person going into somebody else's shoes, another experience created by Carnegie Mellon students was an experience called thin line. And this was designed to help doctors and nurses understand what it's like to be a woman who has had an abortion and then has to go and talk to doctors and nurses about it. Because very often there is prejudice against patients who have had an abortion by doctors and nurses. And this experience of kind of hearing the story of this person and kind of going through their life and then seeing what is it like to be a patient going to see doctors and nurses that that look down on you because of your past is something that really helps open the minds of doctors and nurses. And so thinking about situations where you being somebody else actually matters and can help open someone's mind is something worth thinking about. So related to that is the idea of making VR into something that will let people be creative. It can be tempting to just use VR as a playback device, just like you are right now. You're watching me kind of give a lecture and it's a playback device. But when VR is something that can be a creative tool, of course, right now I'm using as a creative tool, then people can get much more engaged. I wonder who's more engaged right now, you or me? We'll have to think about that. Obvious examples are things like Tilt Brush, where people get to do 3D sculpting right there in VR. And the things you draw and sculpt are all around you. Those are very incredibly engaging. We worked on one called History Maker. We asked ourselves the question of what is going to be the best way to use VR to create an experience that connects students to history? And at first, everybody thinks about, oh, we'll create battlefields. We'll create ancient cities. And of course, those things are incredibly expensive to do. And you're going to spend millions of dollars to build this. And we kept looking, how could we do something much more economical that could also be influential? So we started thinking about VR as a creative tool. And so I'll show you our little trailer of how History Maker VR works. Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Welcome to today's Social Studies Classroom, where the virtual reality content creation tool, History Maker VR, can enhance the learning experience. Students can immerse themselves in history while showing off their knowledge by embodying eight diverse characters across US history, from Ben Franklin to Sonia Sotomayor. It's easy to use. Students set up the scene and select their props, create their performance, import their script and start recording, export, edit and share their performances with teachers and classmates. So you get the idea there. It's not that different from what I'm doing right here, except that it's focused much more on stepping into the shoes of historical figures and actually being able to give speeches as that figure. And it is very powerful to be able to step into the the shoes of these characters and these these historical figures and look down and your body is their body and you have their skin and you look in the mirror and there's their reflection right there. We found that not only do the students find it very engaging because creating interesting videos is so culturally relevant for them, but we found history teachers found this very interesting and inspiring because perspective taking is something that they care so much about. So my third tip is finding ways to design for both teachers and students together. Certainly, these are things we focused on with both Hololab and History Maker. We kind of thought about what do the teachers care about? What do the students care about in Hololab? The students were most interested in kind of finding ways to fool around and that sounds bad, but it's really not because when they're fooling around, they're learning the boundaries of what's acceptable and what's not. It's always a problem. Students want to fool around in real world chemistry labs to be able to get that fooling around out of your system and actually kind of break some glass and it's OK in the virtual world kind of makes everybody understand where the boundaries are. Now, what the teachers really cared about? The teachers cared about students learning proper lab practice. We at first were very focused on chemical reactions because we thought, oh, that surely is going to be what the teachers are going to want to teach. But it turns out they really cared much more about what's the right way to use a balance? What's the right way to scoop powder? What's the right way to use a pipette? Those sorts of things. And so we ended up turning it into a game show all about are can you do chemistry practices properly? So another tip is fulfilling educational fantasy because people always focus on, oh, what's the curriculum and oh, what's the fun? But thinking about the educational fantasy is an important idea. And one place we did this was an experience we created called deep time detectives that we created for the Smithsonian Institution. This was something that was designed for parents and children to play together. The concept is that a family goes to the museum. Only one of them can put on the headset. It's usually one of the children and that the person in the headset has the ability to kind of uncover fossils. And the the rest of the family is looking at a screen of what they're doing. But they have another screen that has more information about the fossils and it forces the family to have discussions together because only some of them have the different types of information. And they have to talk about identifying these fossils. Now this experience, we could have kept it very just like, here's your fossils. Now let's talk about them. But we realized it was very important to focus on the fantasy of what is it like to be a paleontologist. So here you can take a look at a video of a parent and child doing this together. So we didn't need necessarily to do the actual brush. We didn't really need to put that in there, but we put it in because it's fun. First of all, like, that's just a great VR interaction, kind of using the brush to kind of uncover the fossil. It's just fun to do. But secondly, it's a big part of the fantasy of being a paleontologist. And you hear them talk about it in the video. They talk all about how, hey, you know what? This is even better than at the actual museum. Oh, OK, all right. So tip number five is you want to involve the spectators, right? So you saw part of that happening right there in Deep Time Detectives is that when you have people who are watching, if you can find ways to kind of get them involved, that that can help keep everybody interested. A great example of this is the game Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, a really successful VR game. If you haven't played this, you really should check it out. It's a lot of fun. So the way this works is if you see on the left here, there's a group of people playing it. They have all these papers they printed out that are manuals about diffusing a bomb. And you see, there's only one person there that actually has the headset on. And that person is the only one with access to the bomb. And this creates a really fun dynamic because it lets the people outside do something that's hard to do in VR. One thing's not great in VR. Text, text is not detailed. Text is kind of hard to read, hard to manipulate. But here, these these people outside can have a lot of access to detailed text. And the person in VR, of course, can manipulate invisible 3D objects. And so that creates an awful lot of fun. So we use a lot of that same idea in Deep Time Detectives and tried to create experiences that required both players to work together. So I talked about it a little bit. But here, I want you to see what it's like when two people work on this together. Closely related animals have fun for similar reasons. I told you to. Only, okay? We'll tell you where to search. I mean, where to search, Dad? Um, back, hind leg. Oh. Your phones. I don't even know what that means. If you're currently looking at an ankle bone diagram just from the two animal groups, describe it for us and we'll make sure to look at the right errors. Discuss which of the two groups matches. We've got a sealed dog group, whale deer group. I don't do whale deer group because that looks like a deer. Like, you see the headatures of the animal. So you get the sense, you know, the, um, the father and son kind of working on this together. One of them can manipulate. The other one has access to other information and they have to do the discovery together. And that, you know, there's something really fun about designing for that, letting people kind of participate together because not everybody's ready for VR. A lot of people just, they're like, oh, I'm not really ready for that. But they don't mind watching their friend do it. In fact, it's kind of fun for them to watch their friend do it. And if you create an experience where they can kind of work together, that can be a lot of fun. We found with our successful title, I Expect You to Die. That's often how a lot of people play it. One person will wear the headset. The other person's watching the screen and kind of offering advice about how to solve the puzzles. And it's a nice way to create something that's a social experience without having to deal with all the headaches of multiplayer, multi-headset gameplay. So now you may be still wondering like, okay, well, those are some interesting experiences, but I don't know if I'm ready to kind of embrace VR for education. I mean, the market is too small. It's too early. There's a lot of reasons that you might say, hey, I'm not ready for that. But if you care about educational apps, I want you to look back in time a little bit. When people talk about some of the most successful educational games of all time, Oregon Trail always comes up. It has been a game that has been a success in getting people interested in history and through gaming. This game came out in 1971. Can you imagine working on this in 1971? What market was there? It didn't make any sense to be doing this. And that's what pioneering is all about. If you are there early working on things, if you're the first one in there, you have a chance at really influencing the way the entire medium is going to be used for the next 50 years. So something to think about that, yep, the market's not giant yet. But on the other hand, you might have a chance to be incredibly influential if you start working now. Thank you very much for having me here today. It was super fun to be here in VR and doing this. I'm happy to chat with anybody about these things. Do feel free to drop me an email if you like and have a great time at the conference.