 Hello everyone and welcome to the 4.30 to 5 o'clock PM session of the Open 2019 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session we are happy to introduce a presentation called A Graduate School Residency in Virtual Reality. Our speaker is Scott Dolphin. Please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for full speaker bios, details of sessions and the full schedule of events. Scott Dolphin has had a 35-year career in art and design and is now a graduate student in learning with emerging technology at SUNY Empire State College. He will talk to us today about some observations and conclusions regarding development this technology and other things. The session is being live streamed and recorded so if you have questions or comments during the session you may send tweets to at opensimcc with the hashtag OSCC19. Welcome everyone. Let's begin the session. Hello everyone and welcome. My name is Scott Dolphin and my co-author on this research was Dr. Eileen O'Connor who I believe is somewhere in the audience out here. Hello Eileen. I look forward to speaking to you later. So just to get started on a wet and cold Saturday in October of 2018 a day much like today in the northeast the SUNY Empire State College Masters program in learning with emerging technology better known as mallet held a one-day immersive residency in virtual reality. The primary goal was to introduce students new to the program to faculty and colleagues and to present projects from the advanced level curriculum design courses specifically those areas that incorporated augmented reality virtual reality and arts based STEM and game based e-learning practices. There was also a secondary goal and that was to demonstrate to the incoming students the efficacy of hosting and engaging an informative group activity in an immersive virtual reality environment. So residencies are integral to higher education. Educators have long known the benefits of gathering in groups for learning exploration and problems solving. It's the foundation of pedagogic theory. Residencies are also theoretically rooted in knowledge construction is documented by Piaget and social learning is defined by Weigowski. Residencies are not restricted to academia ongoing professional development is actually mandated in numerous medical legal and professional fields. Recently many universities have discovered that planning and hosting a virtual conference helped with a collective rethinking of the role of the academic library in a world of digital media. However as any graduate student or faculty member will tell you residencies can be a challenge both financially and operationally. Logistically they require venues, avi equipment, catering of some sort staffing and a large amount of print media and literature all of which can take a sizable chunk out of the annual budget with any organization. All that being said they have become a necessary fact of life. Now why residencies in VR? We've known for over 80 years that learning builds on existing knowledge ever since Piaget asserted that learners recall their previous mental schema when they encounter new situations. VR environments like these can create visual and mental schema of a shared meeting space. Building on Weigowski's principles of social constructivism and knowledge construction virtual worlds such as the one we're in now offer participants a sense of presence, immediacy, movement, artifacts and communications that are typically unavailable from other platforms like zoom, Skype and go to meeting. And as any of the attendees here can attest the immersive nature of VR environments allows for participants to envision themselves completely present within these environments. This sense of embodiment is known as being telepresent and it's a phenomena well known to most gamers. As we've been seeing all day today the multimedia presentation lecture model works very effectively in a VR setting. AV presentations can be created with relative ease and hyperlinks to websites or other digital media can be passed through the group through a built-in chat feature. Now the chat feature is a very unique function for smaller groups of VR for which there's no real equivalent in the real world. It allows for a dual stream of communication. The presenter can deliver the presentation uninterrupted by excessive questions or audible side discussions and a co-presenter can then modify or monitor the discussions in the chat function and briefly clarify points as needed. When properly implemented it allows for ideas and connections to be made spontaneously and circulated in the moment. And of course another benefit of conferencing in VR is that this highly saturated multimodal interaction can all be easily recorded and reviewed on a laptop or computer for any missed information or data. Any screen recording program can save an event as an mp4 file. Firestorm has a chat record function that can save side discussions and any links to collateral information presented in the chat stream. Now recording services like this for most location events are generally cost prohibitives. Any computer or laptop that can handle a 64 bit graphics of online gaming like Minecraft or World of Warcraft can handle VR with no problem. A decent headset with a microphone is also recommended for better voice communications. I use an old pair of Apple plug-in headphones. The only time I've ever really run into trouble streaming was trying to zoom a VR environment to a large group of people and then click on a YouTube video while I was in world and it was a lot like a digital version of the movie Inception and it took a heck of a lot of bandwidth. The cost to students for VR residency is very low. Basic membership for most cloud-based VR platforms is generally free and of course all users must register with a grid. In our case we use kitely.com. You have to start with a starter avatar. Users also have to download and use a third party viewer app like we're doing now in Firestorm although most of them are already familiar with it from having been used in Minecraft or Fortnite. The single biggest issue that required any special consideration for us has been the VR onboarding process. As luck would have it all of our participants in attendance in the 2018 event with one exception had previous VR experience either gaming or part of a virtual classroom or as previous VR tourists. The single VR newcomer we had in attendance at that event struggled a little bit in the early stages but they managed to gain enough control of their avatar and AV controls to participate. We had a much higher attendance in 2019 and from my perspective a lot fewer problems. Login and general microphone instructions had been passed out in advance with great success and we only experienced one microphone problem with one of the presenters and we created a bit of a workaround. I called her on my cell phone and then put her on the speaker through my avatar. They saw her standing next to me but heard her voice coming through my avatar so we got laughs at the very least. In the 2018 residency we had 22 attendees broken down as follows. We had 10 graduate students from the various education programs, four faculty members, six alum, and a guest from another out-of-state university as well as the dean of the School of Graduate Studies. This year's residency was held just eight weeks ago and we had around 40 participants and had to split the event into two separate islands. We had guest visitors from as far away as Texas, California, and Europe. Now as I mentioned before the residency was conducted on the Kytley grid. Kytley is one of several open source grids which many of you are familiar with that offer inexpensive and readily available internet-based venues. Now some of the more spectacularly beautiful worlds one can visit on Kytley you may already be familiar with some of these are a virtual recreation of Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural masterpiece Falling Water. You can tour Edo period Japan. One of my personal favorites the Battle Ground of Wounded Me and there we go rural Australia this was a lot of fun if you love kangaroos like I do and then there's other worldly fantasies like the works of James Cameron and JJ Abrams and these are just a couple of them here. The residencies have been hosted on the island of my co-author Dr. Eileen O'Connor it's called Marion Island it's her primary region on the Kytley grid. The Empire State College Mallet program has maintained VR environments for several years now in both Second Life and on Kytley. These environments are used in both undergraduate and graduate courses. The grid shown here is her second island this is Marion Test and it's a lot of fun to visit it contains a walled city, a desert of racists, a plague village, and some traditional classrooms and meeting areas. Now as we discussed before about creativity one doesn't necessarily need to have any special design skills these days the market has come so far along there are beautiful ready-made virtual worlds and objects available almost at no cost through Creative Commons. These plug-and-play islands can be saved as OAR files downloaded to your computer and then simply uploaded to your grid of choice. I personally have satisfied my retail therapy needs a number of times in the Kytley market that's a lot cheaper than Amazon. Grid space rental for these islands is actually very very reasonable that's the reason we use them. The cost for a Kytley account is about $20 a month for a very large region big enough to host up to 40 avatars and these regions are large enough to create separate breakout discussion zones and that's important. Now the day's agenda for our 2018 event covered mass media news articles that situated the use of emerging tech within entertainment corporate America and current educational theory. Bennett said weighed into the applied use of emerging tech in educational practice specifically augmented reality virtual 3d mapping and 360 cameras. One particularly interesting project of note that was brought up the 2018 event and a favorite of mine was the River City project by Dr. Jody Clark and Chris Dede for Harvard. This is a VR reenactment of a 19th century village where virtual residents are suffering from a series of health problems. High school students were then instructed to gather data on the environment, make hypothesis, test the hypothesis and then determine conclusions as to why the residents were suffering all in an exploratory interactive self-directed VR environment. Their takeaway was that the social nature of a shared virtual world left more opportunities for students to take their own paths through the resources and activities together. This engaged self-direction demonstrates the virtual or the concept of inherent motivation and that's a holy grail of all learning objectives. For both years, some very interesting discussions centered around the steadily increasing use of virtual and augmented reality for training medical students in high-risk scenarios i.e. dealing with extreme trauma or infectious circumstances. We've had one recent graduate do some very interesting work in AR with medical situations training nurses. Now I was a student attendee for the 2018 event and the post-event discussion board was very active. The K-12 teachers talked about the relevance of VR and AR that already had in their classrooms. The instructor developing materials for patient care for a pharmaceutical organization mentioned that VR could be a suitable space for family and patient meetings. The community college instructional designer found ways to apply emerging tech to his field and the techno arts students noted the interesy and detail in the VR artifacts themselves and discussed how best to create them. All of this was evidence that our group had moved simply beyond assimilating information presented to making connections and visualizing how to apply them. On the whole, the student feedback from both 2018 and 2019 showed an overwhelmingly positive response to VR. As I mentioned in the opening the weather on the date of last year's event was cold, windy, and wet for most of the entire northeast and not one attendee had to worry about travel. The overall feeling was the immersive nature of the event was particularly noteworthy. Given that the attendees were as far away as Buffalo, Outer Long Island, and in one instance as I mentioned before Texas, the lack of physical boundary restrictions or that need to travel on a day with truly awful weather was a huge positive noted by almost all the participants. In particular we had one student who was down with a severe cold who otherwise would have missed the event entirely. Some of the notable student responses were it was more comfortable than attending a real-world residency and my favorite and he knows who he is in VR you always know where the bathroom is. I attended myself wearing polar fleece pajamas and an Empire State T-shirt. Based on my personal observations as the semester progressed the overall level of collegiality professional sharing and engagement that developed during the residency was maintained throughout the group so we developed a community of practice during this event. This year we made some some improvements we sent out repeated advanced preparatory directions on the downloading the appropriate VR viewer. We required that participants test their internet connections and computer speeds and avatar controls well in advance of the event to ensure that they had the right setup. For the record I've used a Bluetooth iPhone hot spot in airports and waiting rooms with very great success on a number of occasions. We prescheduled help desk support and phone assistance in advance of the conference. I was the help desk support for the last one for much of it and everybody did fairly well other than the one connection with the speaker that we had issue with. We asked the new recruits to arrive early when time could be allotted prior to the event to help any attendees still having problem and I don't recall any one maybe one person had a little bit of resin issue and that was about it. Some of the faculty provided additional incentive for attendees to visit the environment in advance of the conference by awarding badges and documenting their VR proficiency. And in addition to the moderator for each island we had two hosts for every presentation this time one to deliver the presentation and work the slides and the other one to monitor and record the chat. Following up on this year's feedback we've had several requests to add a socializing component to the next residency and a number of attendees have expressed an interest in learning how to do some basic building and we're still trying to figure out how to get 30 people to do that all at once. Plans to incorporate these into the residency or perhaps a follow-up event or in the works. Based on both faculty observations and attendee feedback from a post event survey the residencies have been considered an overall success. New connections were established both between colleagues and between the ideas presented and the time invested in creating this VR experience early in the mallet program appeared well spent in time in terms of the advances in student thinking. The interactions among both the advanced and incoming students and a new found awareness they had of the potential of the technology. In conclusion it was determined that while providing adequate onboarding preparation for the subsequent event took some time and resources the significant time and expenses devoted to planning for the physical for a physically geographically located event far outweighed the time and expense creating a good VR onboarding tutorial and designating some onboard support. And finally as more and more organizations and institutions move into VR settings the mallet program will continue to extend the work. So thank you all for coming. Great Scott. Thank you. Are there any questions? I've been monitoring the chat and if you have any just go ahead and type them in. That was really very interesting. Okay great thank you. Thank you for a terrific presentation. As a reminder to our audience you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. Following this session the next session will begin at seven at six five p.m. in this keynote region and is entitled design challenges in youth safe VR environments. Also we encourage you to visit the OSCC 19 poster expo in the OSCC expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and explore the hypergrid tour resources in OSCC expo 2 region along with sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC expo regions.