Virtual reality was never on Reilly Cisco’s mind when he graduated with his class of 26. Growing up in a small Oregon town with a population of just 90, he had limited access to technology in his school.
Cisco, now a UI graduate student and technology assistant for the College of Art and Architecture, said he became a believer in virtual reality (VR) after finally experiencing the technology at the 2014 Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival.
“Virtual Technology and Design (VTD) had a demo there — in all honesty, a really poor demo,” he said. “You stood at a rock concert and looked around. It wasn’t good, but I could see the potential and all of a sudden I was no longer at a jazz festival, I was transported somewhere else.”
Cisco is one of many University of Idaho students now exploring VR and its many possibilities. Program Head John Anderson said VTD has been at the forefront of implementing and using the cutting-edge technology.
“It feels gradual for me after 20 years of research, but this rapid shift has been the last three to four years — tech is now consumable,” Anderson said. “What used to be 50 to 100,000 we can now supply for hundreds. This is the golden age of VR, so in that sense it’s emerged overnight, but we’ve been designing and living in this world for a very long time.”
Anderson said the changing landscape of education, and more specifically classroom gamification, lead to a more tailored, individualistic approach to learning.
“We’re used to common core standards, and our classes often only test immediate knowledge instead of long-term knowledge and goals,” he said. “When you gamify you’re applying that knowledge, tracking the quality of knowledge you have — if it’s lacking, we can find tutorials or exercises to build more.”
VTD major Ethan Dale said while he still looks back fondly on his high school professors, he recognizes not all students learn in similar ways. Using new technology in classrooms, specifically VR, could help further engage students who are visual learners, he said.
“How much more powerful would it be to experience the Revolutionary War if you’re on the boat with George Washington? I think that’s much cooler than learning it out of my textbook, learning the details instead of just memorizing the dates,” Dale said.
Telepresence, or utilizing VR to make the user feel as if they’re in a different location, is a concept Anderson said will become increasingly more important for educational purposes.
“Schoolkids can travel anywhere, we can have virtual teachers — we can be taught by Einstein, or at least his virtual avatar,” he said. “You can teach history through interaction and still be entertained, so the line between entertainment and education will continue to blur.”
Jean-Marc Gauthier, associate professor, said he continues to be fascinated by the next step — the next innovation.
“If what we’re using right now is super crude, if what we consider now to be the ultimate VR experience is crude, what can be researched that will make it better — that’s the next question,” he said.
Gauthier said 5G has the potential to replace not only the computer, but to some extent the internet and this change could occur within the next several years.
“This is the big revolution and what we might now consider as change could turn out to be extremely limited going forward — the spirit of embracing change is key, to let go, retool, be in another mindset,” he said.
Gauthier said teaching has become a more complex situation, as VTD uses tools such as Unreal Engine 4 and Unity which could theoretically disappear from the market at any time.
“That belief you had before, that you’re doing something right for a limited time — what do you do when that’s gone?” Gautier said. “You have to find what stairs of your previous knowledge you can still climb, the constant innovation balanced with repetition. What our students learn now is short term — one year, two years, then it’s different. We give them the capacity to learn how to learn.”
For Dale, he views each program as something he can continue to learn in his spare time.
“If you handed someone a calculator who has never seen one, they would begin to understand it if they messed around enough — but they have to understand the numbers in the first place,” he said. “You can learn Microsoft Word pretty quick, but that doesn’t make you a writer.”
Cisco and Dale both said stigma about video games may begin to fade as more people are exposed to VR and more educational technology. Specifically, phone applications such as Duolingo, a free, language-learning program, have gamified their software in often overlooked ways, such as providing point incentives and rewards.
As commercial VR continues to evolve and decrease in price, Cisco said the technology will be easier to plug into education and will resonate more with consumers. Lower-end headsets or add-ons such as Google Cardboard have led to very poor consumer experiences, he said, which may paint an incorrect picture of VR’s true capabilities.
“I sometimes wonder, ‘Are we just the videogame major? Do people think we just sit here and play games all the time?’” Dale said. “Ignoring the benefits of video games, VR, really anything is a dangerous process.”
The common goal shared by instructors and students alike will continue to be a pursuit of the “why,” Cisco said.
Gauthier echoed a similar sentiment and said while it’s possible for people to explore the topic simply because of a mandatory class requirement, it seems unlikely.
“Can you have a VR experience that makes you cry? I think so. Can it make you laugh? I don’t know,” Gauthier said. “You can laugh in a video but that’s different. The emotion, the empathy, the W-H-Y — this is what we discuss. If you study sciences, the ‘why’ is in the answer. But sometimes you spend a million dollars and it’s useless, or doesn’t produce results, and then someone comes out of nowhere with just a laptop and revolutionizes the craft — that’s kind of exciting, is it not?”
Story by Max Rothenberg
Graphic by Grayson Hughbanks
Design by Grayson Hughbanks