Virtual Reality Learning Lab

We explore the possiblities of VR as a tool for learning

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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.

My research

I’m a guest PhD researcher at the Media Technology group at Leiden University, which means I have no paid appointment. Prof. dr. Bas Haring is my promotor. In the first year of my research I’ve been lucky enough to receive a small grant from LUF and the Gratama foundation. Moreover, the university pays me for the Honours Class I teach and the occasional guest lecture.

Besides this, my research is funded by the commercial services we offer with the Virtual Reality Learning Lab, which mostly consists of professional courses. Here we share the knowledge we’ve gained in our research in forms that are actually helpful for our clients. Our clients include schools, teachers (from primary school to University), educational publishers, professional training institutions, libraries and other organisations.

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Comenius grant for AI + VR project with Tilburg University

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. Our role in this project is to organize professional training for the involved teachers, researchers, and programmers and to help with the development of the educational innovations. A very interesting challenge, which you will definitely read more about on our website during the following years.

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Why we don’t recommend Oculus Go for schools

Updates are coming on the Oculus Go, the highly anticipated stand-alone VR headset. Many educators are excited as well about this device, as it has a few important upsides:

  • At $199 it’s quite cheap
  • There is no hassle with separate phones that you have to attach to a VR headset
  • The remote control gives you interactive possibilities, although not nearly as much as an HTC Vive/Oculus Rift/Windows MR set.

The simplicity of this device really makes it attractive to schools. You can easily imagine a cart with 15 of these devices, including a charging system, which teachers can reserve for certain classes.

In my opinion however, the disadvantages of this system outweigh the advantages:

You only have access to the Oculus ecosystem, which is a really closed-off system and owned by Facebook

We have a lot of Oculus Gear VR headsets with Samsung phones. We really like those, as the Oculus system has quite high-quality experiences and most importantly: everything just works. But the great thing is that you can use these phones in other ways as well. You can use them for regular apps, or perhaps some Augmented Reality apps. Or use them to control 360 cameras and watch YouTube 360 videos. And most importantly: you can also easily use them for Google Cardboard apps which is a much more open ecosystem. You just slide the phone into a Google Cardboard headset and you’re ready to go. Or we sometimes even use this trick, where you don’t connect your phone to the Gear VR:

More experimental apps, or perhaps a VR experience that your students have created themselves, are usually only accessible from Google Cardboard. But also established educational apps like Google Expeditions are only for the Google Cardboard platform. You just miss a ton of content when you choose for an Oculus Go.

Update

There was some discussion going on about this article, I decided to add an update.

First of all, we are well aware that we are quite privileged to have a choice between this many devices. But considering what we do, we think it makes sense.

Secondly: we’re not saying that this device doesn’t offer any value to schools. Of course not! The Oculus Store features some great apps. But we don’t think it’s the best option if you want to stay flexible, that’s why we don’t recommend it.

So, what do we recommend then? That’s quite a complicated question; we have noticed that we advice schools and teachers different things based on their specific situation. But if you want to buy ‘cheap’, versatile mobile VR sets and you don’t want to depend on the phones of your students, we advice to buy a Gear VR + a refurbished Samsung Galaxy S6 or newer. In the Netherlands you can get a refurbished S6 + Gear VR for around €235. And some other advice: don’t buy a lot of hardware at once as VR hardware improves pretty rapidly. Our advice is to take it slow, focus on the content and the implementation in your lessons and carefully take next steps.

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HUBspot virtual tour

We created a virtual tour for HUBspot Leiden, the center for innovation and entrepreneurship in our lovely city. We’re very glad to be part of this great place!

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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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Short Introduction: Kasper and IJsbrand

Virtual Reality in education gains more and more popularity and we are full of new plans. Therefore we are happy to welcome Kasper and IJsbrand in our team, who joined us recently. A short introduction.

First Kasper. He is a Media Technology student at the Hogeschool Leiden and is our new trainee. Kasper is supporting us with all sorts of educational activities and is developing his own VR app, in which he will show us what possibilities are already available for education. Curious? Be patience, he is still working on it…

IJsbrand is a journalist and copywriter. In our company he will write blogposts, is working on content marketing and is involved in creating our new online course. His goal is to help the VR Learning Lab to become better known abroad and to make the online course a succes.

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Pacman 360 stop motion animation

It was already somewhat later in the evening when HUBspot colleagues Max and Tom were playing with clay, after a creative workshop. Robin joined them, together they created some figures. This evolved into an entire Pacman leven, after which someone suggested the idea to make a stop motion animation with 360 photos. A few hours later we had this:

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New Cardboards are in!

Our new Google Cardboards are in! Still a very cool tool for a first introduction in VR. Participants of our workshops and masterclasses receive one of these to experiment further at home.

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In de media: RTL Nieuws – NPO – Computers op School

Virtual Reality for education is gaining quite a lot of media attention as more educators are experimenting with this technology. During the past weeks Robin gave a few interviews in Dutch.

RTL Nieuws

We helped with the production of an item on the Dutch news show RTL Nieuws. Robin gave an interview at our office while Donna was drawing a tree in Tilt Brush. Teacher Malika van Gein (who participated in our Masterclass) shows how she uses VR during her geography lessons. Here you can watch the item!

 

De Kennis van Nu

Dutch radio show De Kennis van Nu interviewed Robin en wrote this articl on VR headsets in schools.


 
 
 

Computers op School

In the September issue the education magazine COS highlights Virtual Reality in education. Here you can find the issue.

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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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CRKBO registrated institution

In the summer of 2017 we have improved our customer experience and documented what we think is important for the best care of our students. We created new Terms and Conditions and an official complaint procedure to make sure that we can deliver services of the highest quality.

 

This effort was rewarded, the Virtual Reality Learning Lab is now a ‘CRKBO registrated institution‘. This also means that we can deliver services in the Netherlands which are exempted from sales tax.

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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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Vives Magazine: Google Expeditions, virtual tour and more

After an enjoyable meeting with independent education journalist Carla Desain, an interview with Robin was published in education & ICT magazine Vives. Below, you can read the entire piece, focusing on a virtual tour in Google Expeditions, designing in VR and future research.

(Translation to English is pending)

Je kunt met VR heel goed de praktijk in de klas halen

Want to know more?

Want to know more about the possibilities of Virtual Reality in education? Take a look at the Masterclasses we offer, or subscribe to our newsletter with the link below.



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Innovation in education from primary school to university

In April, professionals from all across Dutch educational spectrum took part in our Masterclass “Virtual Reality in Education”. Over the span of four sessions, we discussed in what ways VR could provide innovations in education, followed by the participants figuring out for themselves how to utilize and create VR applications. Aside from teachers in primary-, secondary- and higher education, some of the participants revealed a background in business, allowing a wide variety of knowledge to be shared between different fields.

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Conference – Learning with VR

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!

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Virtual Reality in the classroom, but how?

A lot of teachers and educators we talk to turn out to be excited about the possibilities of Virtual Reality in the classroom. Seeing how impressive Virtual Reality experiences can be, we are not surprised by this. VR allows you to visit historical battles, active volcanos, constructions and archeological sites. With VR, you can study microorganisms, complex datasets or mathematical figures. For students of all ages, VR offers the ability to examine abstract educational material from a new and different perspective.

Virtual Reality in de klas

Additionally, the opportunity to create just about anything in Virtual Reality can be quite alluring. Ways to develop continue to improve, creating new possibilities every so often. During each workshop we organize, we discover new and exciting ways to apply VR.

Many schools and educators wish to start experimenting with Virtual Reality in their classrooms. The question is: where to start? In this post, we discuss a number of ways you can start using Virtual Reality in your classroom.

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First VR Learning Lab Meetup

We can look back on a very successful first VR Learning Lab Meetup! Even though the KNMI declared code orange because of an impressive storm, many found their way to HUBspot. There were drinks, snacks, many VR demonstrations and interesting presentations by four student groups.

We would like to thank everyone, especially all the students, for contributing to this exciting event! We’re planning to organize next meetups in the future. Feel free to contact us if you’re interested in presenting a project.

Reporter Wilfred Simons from Leidsch Dagblad visited as well and wrote an article on the event, which you can read here .

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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.

Presentations

Chromatin in VR
Understanding protein folding with immersive data visualization
Joey Brasspenning & Joost Wardenier

Talking to Aliens
Deciphering spatial grammatical structures in a self-made language
Marianne de Heer Kloots & Gosse Minnema

Project Anger Induction
Can Virtual Reality help children in anger management?
Nesse van der Meer & Pieter Rohrbach

DinoZapp VR
Collaborate to identify dinosaurs
Han Lie, Gosse Mol & Roos Hoefnagels

This event is also the official opening of the office of the Virtual Reality Learning Lab.
You are very welcome to celebrate this with us on Thursday February the 23rd 17:00 – 20:30 @HUBspot, Langegracht 70 Leiden.

Our event is part of the weekly OpenHUB, which makes this a great opportunity to visit HUBspot.

Please join the Facebook event, or send us a e-mail if you are planning to come.

 

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NRO Kennisrotonde – Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality

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?

The complete study (in Dutch) can be found here. Below, you can read a summary of the study, as published on NRO’s website.

We finished an English translation of the report, which can be downloaded here.

Virtual Reality in de klas

At this time, it is too early to draw any concrete conclusions in regard to the effectiveness of VR or AR in education. However, responses of those who study VR and / or AR in the educational field appear to be positive, as both technologies are expected to be able to provide new ways to educate and learn. The biggest challenge lies in the development of quality content that is both educational and compatible with educational programs.

While solid research on the effectiveness of VR as an educational tool is available, these cases discuss the use of “screen-based VR”, a form of VR that does not utilize a headset, but a monitor. Our study, however, focuses solely on HMD-based (Head Mounted Display) Virtual Reality (which does utilize a headset) as we consider this form to be most commonly associated with VR.

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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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Hack de Pont – VR Hackathon

On the 30th of April 2016 I gave a Unity3D Virtual Reality workshop for the VR Hackathon ‘Hack de Pont‘, organised by Creative Coding Amsterdam, Lava Lab and Submarine Channel. Among the participants were Syrian refugees from the very noble Hack your Future program. Although a large part of the group had never worked with Unity3D before, quite a few interesting projects were created that day!

After the workshop I joined artist Sander Veenhof to create a project of our own. We mixed Ricoh Theta 360 photos Sander took on the ferry ride with a 3D modeled world in Unity3D to create an experience where you travel from the analog to the digital world. In the future it might be available in the Play Store, this tweets shows a preview:

 

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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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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.

Assignment
Groups: 1-3 people
During the lectures you have learned about many different special and visual effects used in film and the different goals (such as: distraction, shock, spectacle, narrative, integration, immersion) that can be reached by applying these effects. For this assignment you are challenged to make use of the visual effects offered by Augmented and Virtual Reality to support one (or more) of these goals you find most interesting.
Since learning Unity3D is an essential part of this workshop, you should make use of this software for your project. Exceptions can be made however, if you can give good reasons for this.

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Brainstorm – Hack the Brain hackathon

For the Hack the Brain hackathon, organized by Waag Society, TNO and the Donders Institute, we created an immersive 3D environment of EEG data using the Oculus Rift. To experience our project you wear a cap with electrodes to capture an EEG signal from the electrical activity in your brain. The Oculus Rift places you inside your brain from where you can see the captured brain activity and fly through your brain. The intensity of the visual effects expresses the activity of alpha waves in that part of the brain. This immersive environment could be used by students to better understand brain activity and the EEG signal this produces. ADHD patients could use it as a neurofeedback system to improve their concentration level and neurologists might use it to simulate the experience of epileptic patients when they have a seizure.

Brainstorm3

Media

On the Mind Extensions website you can find the article I wrote about the entire hackathon. he crew of the Dutch television program ‘De Kennis van Nu’ reported live from the hackathon, the playlist is embedded below. The television show can be found here.

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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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ARBieb

Together with Berber de Vries we developed ARBieb, an Augmented Reality application for children’s books. The app stimulates children to read books and share short reviews. At the same time, it introduces children to Augmented Reality.

The app was developed using Unity and the Vuforia Augmented Reality library.

The app can be downloaded from the Play store, although an updated version will be released soon.