At the end of May 2023 we were approached by NOLAI (National Education Lab AI). Starting September 2024 we have been a consortium partner of the NOLAI and are taking on the development work for one of their 7 pilot projects: ‘Increasing vocabulary through rich context‘. From the NOLAI website:

Increasing vocabulary through rich context

#primary_education #equal_opportunity

Together with Flores schools, we are researching whether virtual reality and AI can increase the vocabulary of preschoolers with educational disadvantages. VR could allow preschoolers at school to actively experience new contexts, such as mountains or dunes. AI could facilitate naturalistic interactions between a child and a virtual companion. What does such an experience require of the students and how can it contribute to their vocabulary development?

In collaboration with scientists from iXperium and Radboud Universiteit.

Virtual Reality for kindergartners?

Language delays are best prevented at a young age, hence the school choice to concentrate on children aged 5-6 years. They see a lot of potential in using Virtual Reality to create a rich context so that language can gain more meaning. Understandable, but we are also quite tentative to work with VR headsets with such a young target group!

All partners are aware of the risks that Virtual Reality can entail. But at the same time, the benefits of this project for equal opportunities can be so great that we think it is worth investigating whether we can use this technology in a responsible manner.

We also see potential in immersive rooms in the classroom. We are experimenting with such setups for use in education. Above, you can see a video of our very first experiment.

However, in this this project we will focus on an application for VR headsets, because the immersive effects will be stronger and this type of application is more scalable.

Learning with Artificial Intelligence

AI plays an important role in this project and will be used in the software in various ways. We think the most exciting form is enabling conversation between the child and the ‘AI tutor’. Practicing your language in a rich context under expert guidance is extremely valuable for children’s language development. However, because a teacher has to divide his or her attention among thirty students, this important learning time is always limited.

However, speech recognition for children with language delays in a busy classroom is a huge technical challenge. In this project we will investigate what the possibilities are and whether we can make this useful for our objectives in a smart way.

We are looking forward to this three-year project!

Featured image: ‘ai generated beach world with sand castle and bucket and shovel water paint style’ by Bing.

Finally, the LIMESCOOP is up!

Step back in time and see Romans walking past the old Fort of Brittenburg. The virtual binoculars are located at the end of the Limes, on the Buitensluis in Katwijk. In public space, freely accessible to everyone!

Quite some time ago we came into contact with architect and client Fons Verheijen. The Limes, the old border of the Roman Empire, has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2021. Although many tourists travel along the old Limes, the conclusion of this route in Katwijk was marked only with “a small silly sign”, according to Fons. That’s just not acceptable, right? Together we developed the concept for the Limescoop.

Archaeologically everything had to be correct. We therefore followed the book Brittenburg by Tom Buijtendorp. Archeology student Aiace Pisaroni devoted his graduation research to this project and Xinas BV made a beautiful 3D model. The Virtual Reality Learning Lab trainees Daan Hobbel, Stijn van Sprang, Stephan Houwaart, Guido van Duijvenvoorde and Enrique Alonso Barreiro developed the interactive 3D world, including a lot of optimization to make everything run smoothly.

We found 100% FAT who could further develop their FATscope and can’t imagine a better partner. What a challenge to make binoculars that can stand outside in storms and heat, that run entirely on a battery + solar panel, work pleasantly, and also look beautiful.

The Limescoop was opened on Friday 16 June 2023 by mayor of Katwijk Cornelis Visser, alderman Jacco Knape and Limes program manager Jelmer Prins. And now we can keep track that the viewer has already been used by many hundreds of visitors! Article in Leidsch Dagblad

Quick 3D scan
https://skfb.ly/oIzWL

An infinite amount of AI generated images deserves an ‘Infinite AI gallery’.

That’s the idea behind this project Stijn van Sprang & Robin de Lange created. When you walk through this 3D world, new parts of the museum are generated in real-time, allowing you to explore it endlessly.

Stijn was an intern at the VR Learning Lab and is now a part-time developer. Stijn put in all the hard design & coding work for this project. Robin had the role of creative director.

Check out the preview below:

Want to learn more?

Do you want to add the Infinite AI Gallery to your event? Or are you just interested in learning more about it?

The past year has brought one of the biggest challenges ever in education. To protect those who are vulnerable and to reduce the pressure on healthcare, we have all shown our most flexible side. The beginning of 2021 is not much different. In this blog, we look ahead. What role can Virtual Reality play in education after this crisis? And how do we contribute to a sustainable implementation of this and other technologies?

Online education is  a huge challenge, for teachers as well as students. Every lecture, I miss  that I am not in the same room as my students. What’s more, our workshops & masterclasses for education professionals are much more enjoyable in-person.

Digital education still has too many limitations, even though I often argue that new digital technology like VR offers possibilities that go beyond education in person.

Unfortunately, the field is not quite there yet. VR headsets are not readily available for everyone and teachers and students often do not have enough experience with the technology to use it effectively for education. Especially not when you suddenly have to switch to online education.

Moreover, you also want to combine digital education and in-person education here. Blended. This way, you can choose the educational platform that fits the best for the material. However, this is precisely what is not possible in these times.

From experiment to implementation

At the same time, let’s commit ourselves to emerge stronger from this crisis.

Let’s work to develop rich, asynchronous digital education that students can follow independently regardless of time and place. Combined with synchronous meetings focused on interaction and knowledge processing. Preferably in-person, but digital if necessary.

At the same time, we continue to experiment with new technology like Virtual Reality to further enrich education.

As this field matures with affordable hardware and a wider range of software, we can work towards sustainable deployment. Grants create room for innovation, but ultimately, the business side must also make sense; your innovation must solve a problem.

In the lecture (in Dutch) I recently gave to all i-coaches of vocational schools, I distinguished these three phases:

We look forward to contributing to exciting educational projects in the Netherlands and to bringing them to the next stage!

Research direction

We want to investigate how VR and other technologies can be responsibly and sustainably deployed in various domains. That is why we will be challenging the following questions in the coming period, together with our team, new interns, and students:

• Can the shortage of internships in educational programs such as nursing be solved with VR & other technology?
  • Together with our intern Tess and educational organizations, we are investigating this urgent question for nursing programs.
• What can we learn from games?
  • Together with our new intern Siem, we immerse ourselves in the creative world of game design and share our lessons.
• How do you design an ‘infospace’?
  • How do you use a 3D environment to convey knowledge? How do you tell a story with it? Read the first blog post in this series here.
• How will Augmented Reality change the world?
  • For a few years, I have been challenging the students of my Honors Class to think about how AR will become part of our world. With this, we explore many interesting opportunities and threats. We will further develop and share these findings through our blog!

We research the various applications of Virtual and Augmented Reality and other technologies and share the findings on this blog. Additionally, we put them into practice by designing our teaching materials based on our research and experiences. In this way, we are involved in all phases that must be completed to deploy VR sustainably.

We believe it’s important that we all think more about a future where we wear smart glasses daily. Because by looking ahead, we can influence what the future will look like.

In our research, we develop stimulating prototypes together with students and interns from, among others, Leiden University. This is also called speculative design. For the Week of Media Literacy, we developed the game ‘ARe you ready?’ in which more than 17.000 young people thought about our future with this technology. (link to game & link to research report)

On Tuesday, February 15 at 15:30, we are organizing a free online event about ‘Our Future with Augmented Reality’. We present a program full of speculative design from various creators. And together with all visitors, we will think about how we can make a positive impact!

On the program:

• Panel with students from the Honours Class ‘Getting smarter with VR & AR’ about their prototypes and ideas
• Provocative AR projects by artist Sander Veenhof
• Daan Hobbel, Sanna Bashir, and Nadine Roos about  the game + research ARe you Ready?
• Gabriele Romagnoli explains how designers shape the future of AR with ShapesXR
• Robin de Lange: education as an ideal place for speculative design. How can you get started yourself?
• Discussion: how can we have a positive impact on the future of Augmented Reality?
• Creative entertainment during the entrance, break, and at the end of the meeting

This event is made possible by the VR Learning Lab, PLNT Leiden & the Honours Academy of Leiden University.

You can watch it here:

You wake up in the year 2027. Right after getting up, you put on your Augmented Reality (AR) glasses. These smart glasses help you throughout the day. They remind you of what you need to do, make lessons more enjoyable, and translate what your new classmate says. Can you visualize this future? Thousands of students have thought about these and other questions. In this article, we share the results.

Update 2022: during the Week of Media Literacy in 2022, there were 8,014 individual players who answered all the questions. The questions remained the same. You can view the results here (note: the report is in Dutch). There are little differences compared with the results from 2021. What did stand out was that fewer students from grades 5 and 6 think that learning foreign languages is necessary if Augmented Reality glasses can be used to interpret other languages for us. We have also created a new English version.

ARe you ready?

Students have shared their opinions while playing the game ARe you ready?, created by our talented interns Daan Hobbel and Sanna Bashir. The game was developed as a ThemeMission for MediaMasters, an annual national competition held during the Week of Media Literacy in November.

Nearly 80,000 players had experienced a day in the life of a child from 2027, in which smart AR glasses play a significant role. With this new medium, you can see things in the real world that aren’t actually there; a virtual layer on top of the real world.

By presenting these questions to the students during the game, we were able to encourage them to think along and come up with their own opinions about Augmented Reality. Having an opinion allows you to support it and prevents experiencing the future passively. This makes sure that not only Meta, Apple, and Snapchat can determine what role AR will play in society, but also citizens.

80,000 plays, 17,000 participants

The game was played more than 80,000 times by the end of November 2021. We collected 17,037 complete answer sets. Of these, we used 5,385 in our analysis. This dataset consists of answers from players aged between 9 and 13, who came to our site via the MediaMasters game. This was measured with cookies, which were necessary to count points for the MediaMasters game. This way, we can be sure that these were all unique players. Players outside this age limit or who played the game through another route were excluded.

Results

The questions that were asked in between the game’s levels can be divided into two categories:

1. The potential of Augmented Reality
2. The societal consequences of this technology.

We will discuss the results per category.

The potential of Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality already has useful and entertaining applications today. For example, checking if a piece of furniture fits in your living room before buying it from the Swedish furniture giant, or using AR to overlay a virtual information layer on the real world. Think of animations and texts that help a novice car mechanic replace brake pads or virtual buttons on a real anatomical model that can be clicked for additional information about an organ.

In the game, players can experience such applications as well as futuristic ones. Are they open to the idea of using smart glasses in this way?

AR as an assistent

In the game, the AR glasses provide nutritional advice. Do children from grades 7 and 8 appreciate this? Most do (73%), although 32% of them would make the healthy choice anyway, regardless of the glasses’ advice (Figure 1). A large portion of children (61%) also find it helpful if the smart glasses help them remember daily.

AR in Education

A smart pair of glasses as a dietitian and personal assistant. Would it also be an interesting addition to education? In the game, children look into the life of a primary school child. The lessons the child receives make use of AR. Only 7% of the children did not like the idea of ​​having lessons with AR glasses (Figure 3). 58% of the children are convinced that this form of teaching is also beneficial for learning  (also Figure 3).

There are many opportunities for AR glasses in education.

We think that smart glasses not only influence how we learn, but also what we need to learn. Robin’s graduation research in 2014 was already about this topic.

In the game, a character speaks Japanese to the player. The AR glasses pick this up and automatically start Dutch subtitles. Is it useful to learn other languages if the smart glasses can translate everything for you? We wanted to further elaborate on this discussion for the participants with this question. 11% of the children think that AR makes learning foreign languages unnecessary. But the majority (62%) would rather not depend on the glasses and still find it useful to learn other languages (Figure 4).

AR for navigation

A more obvious example is navigating with your smart glasses. Virtual arrows projected in the real world help you find your way. In this way, it becomes very difficult to go in the wrong direction. 93% of the children think that we will use smart glasses for navigation later (Figure 5).

The social consequences of Augmented Reality

The emergence of a new computer interface has a huge impact on society and our lives. Enough to get excited about, but also to worry about. That’s why we asked the children if they are concerned about the ethics and safety of AR glasses. 

Exclusion

One of the problems that can arise is a kind of social gap between people who have smart glasses and people who cannot (temporarily) be in our new, enriched AR world. We highlighted a similar situation in the game. Is it bad if there are other children who do not have smart glasses and therefore feel excluded? Most children (87%) think this is (a bit) unfair (Figure 6).

Distraction

The virtual layer projected by an AR glass can be distracting from information in the real world. In fact, things can be hidden by projecting over them. This can be dangerous in traffic. In an AR mini-game in ‘ARe you ready?’, the player is chased by virtual monsters. To stay ahead, many players run through red lights. The use of a smartphone can be dangerous  in traffic.

We asked children if they think smart glasses should be banned on bicycles. 60% agreed. 28% want a special “traffic mode” so that the glasses do not pose a danger on the road and can be kept on. And 12% think we should decide for ourselves whether to keep them on or take them off (Figure 7).

Disruption of public order

Almost everyone has played or heard of Pokémon Go, an AR game that led to large gatherings of people in various locations. We believe that this could happen much more often in the future. Virtual artworks at secret locations and massive AR tournaments in the town square. Are you allowed to just organize this? Or should you apply for permits, like for regular events? 69% of the participating children said that rules should be in place and permission should be requested to organize such events (Figure 8).

Privacy violation

Many companies collect our data without our conscious consent. This data collection can go a step further with the help of an AR headset, as it can see much more and track things other than just online activity. An obvious example is personalized advertisements. The smart glasses could use information about you, such as conversations and images, to project specific ads in the real world; this also happens in the game.

38% of players aged 9 to 13 believed that no information about them should be used to personalize advertisements. 39% thought it was acceptable, but only if they had given permission themselves. 23% had no problems with sharing information (Figure 9).

Are we becoming too dependent on our smart glasses? Technology like an AR headset can easily enrich the real world, making people possibly unwilling or unable to live without it. About 90% of the children find it concerning that we may become too dependent on this technology in the future (Figure 10).

Mission accomplished

We conclude that most children see benefits in using smart glasses, but certainly do not want to become dependent on them.

Let’s nuance the results a bit. This is not scientific research. The answers may have been influenced by how AR was portrayed during the game. And it could be that the youngsters who chose to play this game are overly enthusiastic about new media. Fortunately, our goal was not to conduct an academic study. Our mission was to get children thinking, and we certainly succeeded!

Learn more

• Play the English version of ARe you ready? yourself.
• Want to know more about research where participants play a game to think about an alternative reality or a future scenario? Read the paper Games as Speculative Design: Allowing Players to Consider Alternate Presents and Plausible Features by Coulton, Burnett, and Gradinar (2016).
• Read (about) Robin’s graduation research (2013), which is about how Augmented Reality not only influences how we learn, but also what we need to learn through the interplay of our cognition and the computing power of computers.

Every year Robin teaches an Honours Class at Leiden University. The past years this course was Learning through Virtual Reality

In the fall of 2019 I will (almost certainly) start a new course ‘Augmented Reality & Human-Computer Collaboration‘, which has its focus on how AR will affect our society and influence the future of work.

[Read more…] about Augmented Reality Honours Class – Leiden University

This summary of Google’s I/O 2019 event shows some of the impressive products Google is working on: new Augmented Reality functionalities, a smarter Google Assistant and cheaper Google Pixel phones.

What is really interesting about this event is the shift in the mission of the company:

“We’re moving from a company that helps you find answers to a company that helps you get things done”

This statement by CEO Sundar Pichai illustrates the developments in digital technology and the role digital products will have in our daily lives. The focus in articles on Artificial Intelligence is often on completely autonomous computer systems. The focus in this event however, is mostly on how smarter algorithms allow for more sophisticated computer interfaces for users.

[Read more…] about Google: from finding answers to getting thing done

Today Marleen & Robin (that’s me) visited the kick-off of the PERL group at Leiden University. An interesting afternoon! As probably everybody who attended this event, we think it’s important for students to learn the digital skills they need to create new things. That’s why we organize courses for teachers and students in Processing and CoSpaces Edu an co-organize the CoSpaces Competition!

The day consisted of several talks focusing on research that helps to teach programming skills a little better. In this post I’ll share some insights.

[Read more…] about Research in learning how to program @ PERL Kickoff 2019

By: Robin de Lange

Inspired by the Open science movement, among which this Open Kitchen Science approach, I’ve decided to join this movement and find a fitting open approach for the research we do. In this article I explain the motivation behind this decision and give you some background on our research.

[Read more…] about Open science

The VR Learning Lab collaborated on a project initiated by dr. Marie Postma and her colleagues at Tilburg University. Last week it was announced that this project will receive a NRO Comenius Senior Fellow grant! Here you can find the news item post on the website of Tilburg University.

The challenge of the project is to create a few Virtual and Augmented Reality learning experiences that help students understanding challenging topics within the curriculum of the Cognitive Science & Artificial Intelligence tracks.

[Read more…] about Comenius grant for AI + VR project with Tilburg University

Wearing a VR headset is often seen as a rather individual experience. And indeed, the immersiveness of the experience tends to seclude you from your environment and the people surrounding you. However, there are also different, exciting forms of collaboration in Virtual Reality. Some of these can be very interesting for collaborative learning, or for solving complex problems together. In this article we’ll discuss a few interesting projects, some of which are focused on local collaboration.

[Read more…] about Collaboration in Virtual Reality

[Read more…] about Are the new Windows headsets Mixed Reality?

On October the 11th 2017, the new edition of the Honours Class Learning through Virtual Reality will start! The course is primarily meant for bachelor students who follow an honours track at Leiden University. However, the Honours Academy allows for a few master students each year, which can be specifically interesting for Media Technology students. Please notice however that honours classes are extracurricular and cannot be counted as an elective course. They will be mentioned on your diploma though.

Bachelor students from Leiden University can register for the course on this page, master students on this page. Are you a student from another university? Please contact us, perhaps we can arrange something.

On June 7th, LiketoShare will organize the “Learning with VR” convention. There, Robin will provide a lecture on experimenting with Virtual Reality in higher education. What feasible ways are available to start an experiment? And how do you involve students with this process?

We expect it to be an educational day, with many intriguing visitors!

Commissioned by the Netherlands Initiative for Educational Research (NRO), we have performed an extensive literary study on the use of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality in primary education. The petitioner – the administration of a significant comprehensive school – provided the NRO Kennisrotonde with the following question:

What do we know about the use and effectiveness of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality when applied to primary education?

[Read more…] about NRO Kennisrotonde – Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality

Tonight SURF will officially release their ‘Trendrapport 2016’ at the preconference of the Onderwijsdagen. Robin was honored to be the author of the chapter on Virtual Reality, together with Lieke Rensink and Jan-Paul van Staalduinen. You can download the Dutch Trendrapport here, the English version will follow in the next few weeks.

Tomorrow, on the 8th of November, Robin will give a lecture on VR & education at the same Onderwijsdagen. On both days, the DinoZapp team will be present to show the Virtual Reality game they made in collaboration with Naturalis.

For my current research I broadly explore the potential of Virtual Reality for education. As a part of this I try to form some sort of theoretical framework to describe the unique characteristics of VR as a medium and how it can be used to explain complex concepts and teach different skills.

With some googling you can find quite a few articles (both academic, popular and in-between) that describe the various ways VR could be used in education. There are even a few listicles out there, to use the parlance of our times. Now, who can resist the simplicity of a 5 point overview of this new medium and its role in learning?

[Read more…] about Towards a theoretical framework for Virtual Reality in Education

I do research on the potential of Virtual Reality for education. Now, people generally find VR very exciting and because of this I get a lot of enthusiastic reactions. People can imagine all sorts of useful applications for education. Students could learn about our solar system while experiencing a space flight, or walk through ancient Rome and learn about its history.

Of course, I also receive a lot of reactions that are more critical of VR as a learning tool. We are at a point in time where there’s hardly any decisive research about learning performances in Virtual Reality. We don’t even know yet whether people will buy VR headsets. Shouldn’t we wait for these kinds of things before we invest in hardware and educational VR content? VR has been a hype before, can the technology deliver the promises that are being made?

[Read more…] about The dangers of techno-pessimism in education

During the past year I have spoken with a lot of people about the use of Virtual Reality for learning, which is the topic of my research. Surprisingly many people are really excited about this. But why is this? Why are people enthusiastic about VR in education?

[Read more…] about Why are people enthusiastic about VR in Education?

On March 24th 2015 I gave a talk at the Art of Neuroscience symposium in the beautiful Eye in Amsterdam. More information about this yearly event can be found here.

In my talk I presented the Virtual Reality visualization of live EEG data I created with my team mates Eva Delincakova and Bert Spaan at the Hack the Brain hackathon in May 2014. I discussed the potential of Virtual Reality for immersive data visualization and how this could be used in the field of education.

[Read more…] about Art of Neuroscience talk – Virtual Reality visualization of live EEG data

On the 28th of August 2013 I defended my graduation project:

Developing an Augmented Reality application to promote an extended concept of cognition in education

[ABSTRACT]
The ever decreasing size and price of computer parts seems to be leading to computing power becoming ubiquitous. Similar to technology such as pen and paper, computing power becomes intertwined with our problem solving processes in such ways that it becomes invisible. This development has, and will have, enormous influence on our cognitive profiles. The field of education however, has barely changed to cope with this change in cognitive profiles.  While developments in information technologies are changing how we learn in many ways, we believe it is essential to rethink what we should learn in this perspective of increasing availability and accessibility of computing power.

This research reviews an extended concept of cognition, in which technological elements can actually be part of the cognitive process. We suggest this view as a framework to discuss the goals of education and the technological aids that can be used to reach these goals. To raise this discussion, a mobile application is developed which shows the potential of Augmented Reality techniques to display context-sensitive information, which can be incorporated in the problem solving process.

Download the article here

[Read more…] about Extended cognition in Education