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On the 21st of July, the first in a series of online interviews with experts in the field of VR, AR, 360°, and other innovative digital technologies took place for VR Learning HUB members and other interested individuals. We had the amazing opportunity to talk to Bruces Pales, CEO of the platform 360 Cities. The platform, which was founded in 2008, has been curating and licensing high quality, fully 360° interactive panoramic photos and videos.

Experience the educational value of VR… in VR!

A few years back two of our interns worked on a 360 experience that explains why Virtual Reality can be interesting for schools. Before, it was only available in our app, but we just uploaded it to YouTube.

Have a look, we love to hear what you think.

A while ago I asked my parents what I wanted to become when I was a kid. They couldn’t really think of anything, which matched my own memories. Apparently I never had any specific profession I dreamed of. No obsession with becoming a pro soccer player, movie star or pilot (probably saving me a lot of disappointments). Together we remembered that I did have a fascination for the large office buildings we passed during car or train rides. What happened behind the windows of all those giant anonymous towers; what were people doing there?

[Read more…] about Why I love my job

Does Virtual Reality work on a tablet?

Not ideally, no. But as this picture shows, you can get the two images required on a small tablet. At least on this is Samsung Tab A 8.0. Combine this with a foldable VR headset, like the VR Square Mini we use, and you’re there!

[Read more…] about Virtual Reality on a tablet?

A while ago we made a virtual museum of a few of the most famous GIFs in CoSpaces Edu. Although this was mainly a fun afternoon project, we often show it to illustrate the possibilities for students to make virtual exhibitions for their school projects. Definitely more exciting than another Powerpoint 🙂

[Read more…] about Most famous GIFs in CoSpaces Edu

Which VR headsets should we buy with our school? That’s a question people often email us about. We understand the question very well, as you need hardware to experience VR, right? However, we do think that the question often comes too early in the process. To make a good decision about which headset to go for, you first need to find out what you want to use it for.

We completely updated our VR Buying Guide for Schools in August 2019. We’ve included the Oculus Quest, the Rift S, ClassVR and we’ve made our recommendations more explicit.

[Read more…] about Which VR headsets for your school?

What if the Dutch create the first moon base? Well, it might look something like this.

We built this during on of our CoSpaces Edu teacher Bootcamps. Scroll down to play the game. Are you interested in how we created this? Join our free CoSpaces Edu Level 1 course and we’ll keep you posted with new tutorials and the Level 2 course we’re working on…

[Read more…] about The Dutch Side of the Moon in CoSpaces Edu

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!

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

[Read more…] about Innovation in education from primary school to university

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.

[Read more…] about First VR Learning Lab Meetup

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:

Co-creation with @robindelange: VR experience that lets you take a ferry trip from the analog to the digital world pic.twitter.com/o2QfDa1wRT

— Sander Veenhof (@sndrv) May 3, 2016

On 12 January 2016 I gave a guest lecture at the Education & ICT course at Utrecht University. Great to give students their first VR experience and discuss the potential uses for the field of education.

Some pictures by Casper Hulshof:

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.

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

[Read more…] about Embodied Vision 2015

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.

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.