VR Learning Lab

We explore Virtual & Augmented Reality for learning and solving problems

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Met VR van experiment naar implementatie

Het afgelopen jaar heeft een van de grootste uitdagingen voor het onderwijs ooit gebracht. Om onze kwetsbaren te beschermen en de druk op de zorg te beperken toonden we ons allemaal van ons meest flexibele kant. Het begin van 2021 is niet veel anders. In deze blog kijken we vooruit. Welke rol kan Virtual Reality gaan spelen in het onderwijs na deze crisis? En hoe dragen wij bij aan een duurzame implementatie van deze en andere technologieën?

Online onderwijs is een enorme uitdaging, voor docenten én voor leerlingen. Ik mis ook elk college weer dat ik niet in dezelfde ruimte ben met mijn studenten. En onze workshops & masterclasses voor onderwijsprofessionals zijn toch vele malen leuker in het echt.

Digitaal onderwijs biedt gewoon nog te veel beperkingen. Terwijl ik juist vaak betoog dat nieuwe digitale technologie als VR mogelijkheden biedt die verder reiken dan fysiek onderwijs. 

Maar helaas is het veld daar nog niet helemaal. VR-brillen zijn nog niet beschikbaar voor iedereen. En docenten en studenten zijn vaak nog niet bekend genoeg met de techniek om het echt goed in te zetten voor onderwijs. Zeker niet als je zo plotseling moet overschakelen naar online onderwijs.

Daarnaast wil je ook hier digitaal onderwijs en fysiek onderwijs combineren. Blended. Zo kun je de best passende onderwijsvorm kiezen voor de stof. Maar dat is juist precies wat niet kan in deze tijden.

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Are ‘infospaces’ the new infographics?

This is the first post of a series on creating what we like to call infospaces. Enjoy!

Creating 3D worlds has become much, much easier over the past years. With software like CoSpaces Edu we teach 9 year olds to create their fantasy world with 3D objects and bring them to life with coding blocks.

And the rise of social VR tools like Mozilla Hubs, AltspaceVR and Facebook Horizon are bringing 3D worlds to the professional world. As we’re all are getting tired from pandemic-caused video meetings, we’re looking at new ways to collaborate.

A very early experiment in Mozilla Hubs with our team

Because of this virtual events are in the lift. But to make really valuable virtual events, we have to learn how to use the space effectively. Meeting each other in a virtual lecture hall or classroom while looking at a PowerPoint presentation is just not using all the possibilities.

Virtual museums

One particular assignment we often give our students who are learning these 3D tools is to create a virtual museum. In our experiences this is a very interesting challenge for the students after they’ve learned the basics of the program. And it’s an assignment that can be easily combined with other school subjects.

Our very highbrow exposition on the most famous gifs

It’s interesting to see what students create. They often mimic the musea they’re familiar with. Some also realize they’re not confined by the rules that a real museum has. Their pieces can float in space, and who needs walls? They can add quiz questions, moving objects and interactive information in a way that really isn’t possible in the real world.

Infospaces

The emerging of easy apps to create graphics from data was essential to create the abundance of infographics we now see on the web. Will these new tools bring the same abundance of what we like to call ‘infospaces‘?

For that to happen it has to become even easier to create 3D worlds. We have software tools to help us, which also offer integrated access to databases with 3D models like Sketchfab & Google Poly.
But to make things even easier, we also need design principles and templates. We need easy answers to questions like:

  • How do you clearly represent information spatially?
  • How do you arrange a room to tell a story?

Those are really new questions for the average communicator. Thus far designing spaces to explain something has been mostly reserved to museum curators and museologists.

With the democratization of designing 3D worlds, we think these questions will become more and more important. We have to learn from architecture, theater, museology and the video game industry.

That’s exactly what we will do in this series of posts on creating infospaces! Don’t want to miss a thing? Or do you want to learn more about Virtual Reality? Become a member of the VR Learning HUB for free!

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Augmented Reality op de werkvloer – 29 november – PLNT Leiden

Augmented Reality biedt unieke mogelijkheden om mensen samen te laten werken met computers. Met behulp van sensoren en slimme algoritmes herkent de computer waar de gebruiker mee bezig is en kan precies de informatie tonen die op dat moment relevant is. Dit biedt interessante mogelijkheden voor ‘on-the-job assistance’. Met de juiste software kunnen mensen ingewikkelde problemen sneller oplossen. Een aantal voorbeelden:

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Google: from finding answers to getting thing done

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.

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Research in learning how to program @ PERL Kickoff 2019

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.

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Open science

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.

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Collaboration in Virtual Reality

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.


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Are the new Windows headsets Mixed Reality?

A short blog post after a Twitter discussion with @StephiNaners on the new Windows Mixed Reality headsets. Acer, HP, Lenovo and Dell are all launching their own versions of these headsets in the coming months. They all use the new Microsoft motion controllers, which look pretty decent. They’re significantly cheaper and they use inside out tracking, so no more need for the clumsy sensors the Rift and Vive require. They look like great devices that will definitely help in bringing VR to the masses.

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Registration Honours Class – Learning through Virtual Reality 2017

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.

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Congres – Leren met VR

Op 7 juni organiseert LiketoShare het congres ‘Leren met VR’. Robin geeft die dag een lezing met de focus op experimenteren met Virtual Reality in het hoger onderwijs. Hoe kun je op een laagdrempelige manier experimenten starten? En hoe betrek je studenten in dit proces?

Het belooft een leerzame dag te worden, met veel interessante deelnemers!

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NRO Kennisrotonde – Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality

In opdracht van het Nationaal Regieorgaan Onderwijsonderzoek hebben we een uitgebreid literatuuronderzoek uitgevoerd over Virtual Reality en Augmented Reality in het basisonderwijs. De vraagsteller, een bestuur van een grote scholengemeenschap formuleerde voor de NRO Kennisrotonde de volgende vraag:

Wat weten we over de inzet en effectiviteit van Augmented Reality en Virtual Reality in het basisonderwijs?

Het volledige onderzoek is hier te vinden, hieronder de samenvatting van het onderzoek, zoals ook gepubliceerd op de website van het NRO.

An English version of this report will come out in the near future.

Virtual Reality in de klas

Het is nog te vroeg om harde conclusies te trekken over de effectiviteit van VR of AR in het onderwijs. Veel van de onderzoekers zijn echter positief en zien veel mogelijkheden voor deze nieuwe leermiddelen. De grootste uitdaging ligt in de ontwikkeling van goede educatieve inhoud en inbedding in lesprogramma’s.

Er is goed onderzoek verricht naar de effectiviteit van VR als leermiddel, maar het gaat dan over ‘screen-based VR’, waarbij geen headset wordt gebruikt maar een scherm. In dit onderzoek beperken we ons tot Head Mounted Display (HMD) gebaseerde Virtual Reality, waarbij wel gebruik wordt gemaakt van een headset. Dat sluit volgens ons het beste aan bij het heersende beeld van deze techniek.

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Virtual Reality Meetup: Project presentations & Office Opening Drinks

On the 23rd of February we organize the first VR Learning Lab Meetup. You can experience a few of the Honours Class VR projects and have drinks and snacks.

Program

17.00: Opening and welcome talk by HUBspot

17.30: Opening by Robin de Lange, initiator of the VR Learning Lab

17.45: Project Presentations

18.30: VR Demos + Food and Drinks

You can try out a few of the cool VR projects that have been developed by students and researchers that are connected to the VR learning lab, while enjoying drinks and snacks.

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Anger induction with Virtual Reality

Psychology researchers often require participants to be in a certain emotional state. The Focus on Emotions group does research into effective anger management and needed a way to induce anger in children in a reliable and ethical manner. Motivated by the emotional effects Virtual Reality experiences, they asked Media Technology students to create a project.

Project Anger Induction is a Virtual Reality experience that aims to induce anger in children. The Gear VR / Google Cardboard app allows users to play an enjoyable game with Jasper, our digital avatar. While he might seem like a nice, cooperative boy at first, Jasper’s true nature – a rather annoying one – shows itself over time. Through the use of Jasper, we hope to see to what extent Virtual Reality can be used to create a sense of social anger.

This project was created by the Media Technology students Nesse van der Meer and Pieter Rohrbach in cooperation with Marieke Bos and Carolien Rieffe from the research group Focus on Emotions. Robin de Lange was the supervisor of the project.

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SURF trendrapport 2016

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.

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Towards a theoretical framework for Virtual Reality in Education

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?

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The dangers of techno-pessimism 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?

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Virtual Reality for Science & Education 2016 – a Review

On the 10th of March 2016 we organized the Virtual Reality for Science & Education symposium at the Scheltema Complex in Leiden. I think we can safely state the event was a great success!

Over 125 people attended the event, causing a small shortage of chairs at the busiest time of the symposium. I have seen many familiar faces, but also met a lot of interesting new people. The list of attendees included researchers, professors, high school teachers, entrepreneurs, Virtual Reality developers, policy makers and artists. I think this mix of people led to very interesting discussions, thank you all very much for your input!

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Virtual Reality for Science & Education Symposium – 10 March 2016

Updates about the program below!

During the last few years developments in Virtual Reality have gained a lot of momentum. Almost two decades after the inevitable downfall in the hype cycle, the Oculus Rift showed that a VR headset is within reach for the average consumer. This kickstarted many new initiatives, causing an entire VR ecosystem to emerge, with small start-ups and massive corporations creating new headsets, innovative input devices, spherical cameras and loads of immersive content.

These developments open many possibilities for research and education. Realistic simulations allow police officers to safely train dangerous situations. 3D visualizations can help the design process by allowing the user to walk around in buildings that have not been built yet. But we can also think of immersive data visualizations which can be navigated spatially. Psychology researchers can use VR to measure responses to realistic environments and scenarios. Lectures about ancient Rome could be given while walking past the Colosseum and virtual classrooms could make following a MOOC into a more intense and social experience.

Symposium
To explore the possibilities of this new medium, we organize the symposium ‘Virtual Reality for Science & Education‘ on the 10th of March 2016. The symposium will start at 13:30 at the Scheltema complex in Leiden. Around 17:30 we will end the day with some drinks and Virtual Reality demonstrations.

On this day, the students from the eponymous elective research course of the Media Technology MSc. program will present the VR prototypes they have created.

The plenary program will have speakers from different backgrounds: Virtual Reality developers, scientists who use VR in their research and educators who experiment with VR in the classroom.

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Embodied Vision 2015

In the spring of 2015 I taught the course Embodied Vision together with Dan North. The course was part of the Media Technology MSc. program.

In the lectures given by Dan the students learned about special effects and illusionism in cinema and how this is used in the service of narrative and spectacle. In the following workshops I gave we explored to what extent the visual effects used in film are usable for creating immersive experiences in Virtual Reality. The studens identified differences and similarities between film and contemporary Virtual Reality. For their final project for the course the students created cinematic VR projects which experimented with e.g. stop-motion, green screens, interactive gaze-controlled video and the dolly zoom effect.

cropped-header_Embodied_Vision.jpg

Below you can find some of my slides for the course.

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Virtual Reality for Science & Education

In May 2015 the Gratama Stichting and Leids Universiteitsfonds announced that my research project into the possibilities of Virtual Reality for the field of education will receive the Gratama research grant. Prof. dr. Jaap van den Herik helped me with the application procedure, the research will be part of my PhD work supervised by prof. dr. Bas Haring.

The research project includes an elective course where 30 students will explore the potential of Virtual Reality for science and education by creating experimental VR prototypes. More details about the course in the e-Studiegids.

My research project was mentioned in the Leiden University newsletter and Mare.

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Art of Neuroscience talk – Virtual Reality visualization of live EEG data

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.

Art of Neuroscience talk

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.

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Embodied Vision Workshop: Augmented and Virtual Reality with Unity3D

On the 19th of June 2014 at 10.00, I’ll teach a workshop for the Embodied Vision course of the Media Technology MSc. program. Below you can find a short description of the workshop and the assignment. After the workshop I’ll post a summary of what we’ve discussed.

Embodied Vision Workshop: Augmented and Virtual Reality with Unity3D

In this workshop we will go through the basics of working with Unity3D, discuss interesting projects made with the software and experiment with creating your own Augmented or Virtual Reality project. I will explain about the Vuforia library which can be used to create mobile AR apps and get you started to develop for Oculus Rift. For the workshop you will need Unity Pro which can be downloaded from unity3d.com. Please install the software beforehand. You can make use of the 30-day trial version.

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Extended cognition in Education

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

 

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