Photo by HP
HP Labs researcher Marie Vans
Educators have been experimenting with virtual worlds as teaching environments for over a decade. These customizable 3D spaces let instructional designers create immersive online teaching communities not normally achievable with more traditional, 2D conferencing systems.
Marie Vans, a researcher in HP’s Artificial Intelligence & Emerging Compute Lab, is a longtime participant in, and advocate for, these virtual learning communities. She even studied within one when she went back to school to earn a third graduate degree from San Jose State University’s School of Information, which teaches several classes entirely within virtual worlds.
Now Vans is working with one of her former San Jose State professors and several other information specialists to explore how adding virtual reality to these social worlds could further improve the online learning experience.
“I’m hopeful that social VR will let us create even more compelling and immersive online educational environments than are possible in today’s virtual worlds,” says Vans, who focuses mostly on predictive diagnostics at HP Labs but maintains a professional research interest in the future of educational technologies. “At the same time, I think we can use the proven success of 3D virtual worlds as a model for expanding VR use cases to environments where you explore and learn alongside others.”
The San Jose State School of Information (also known as the iSchool) offers 100% of its classes online and opened its first 3D virtual classrooms in 2007. While students have found these spaces engaging, they are represented within them by avatars that distance them somewhat from the experience, notes iSchool professor Pat Franks. In contrast, Franks says, “in virtual reality, instead of being represented by the avatar, you actually are the player, so you're more a part of the world – it’s quite a different feeling.”
Franks leads the research collaboration that Vans is helping with. Their initial aim is to establish which existing VR platforms might be suitable for hosting online VR classes.
While San Jose State already has an educational research space called eCampus that focuses on integrating virtual and augmented reality into physical classroom, its iSchool needs a VR solution that can be used by a students dispersed across the globe. That means the technology must be both affordable and easily obtained by students wherever they are located. It must also let students make changes in the virtual environment to both demonstrate and share what they’ve learned, just as they can in virtual worlds like Second Life.
“This is essential for learning environments because many people learn best by doing,” explains Vans. “But there are several currently accessible VR environments that can’t be altered by their occupants, so those won’t work for us.”
The researchers hope to have an initial set of recommendations by the end of the summer.
At the same time, Vans is working on extending a virtual world that she has been developing on the virtual platform Kitely, called PashionTech, into VR. This is designed to be a space where K-12 teachers can learn how to get girls interested in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) careers.
In addition to offering new and compelling educational experiences, Vans hopes both of these efforts can provide HP with valuable insights into how the virtual reality experience can be enriched. As a leading creator of VR systems, HP is interested in expanding its understanding of the kinds of virtual content that people find compelling.
“In most of today’s VR applications, people are experiencing these immersive worlds all by themselves,” Vans notes. “That’s true even in areas like gaming, while the most popular non-VR games, like Fortnight and Apex Legends, are now highly social.”
As we look to add social experiences to VR, she says, “we have a lot to learn from the successful, immersive social virtual worlds that people have been building for years now in education.”
