Page 22 - Campus Technology, January/February 2018
P. 22
VIRTUAL REALITY
22
CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | January/February 2018
Each of those labs also includes virtual reality gear (specifically a lone HTC Vive headset). As Pfaff put it, VR is “an isolating experience. Only one person can be in it at a time. It’s kind of hard to figure how this can fit into a classroom.”
Three Stages of Progress
Pfaff described three forms of VR work the center has accomplished so far.
First, there’s the classroom demo, which works “on a small scale.” Students come in and get a demonstration of the VR system to understand how the technology works. For example, he noted, a real estate class used the demo to learn how people sell properties using VR for buildings that haven’t been built yet. The center has also worked with an ecology class and an English class (which was reading a book that involved VR).
The second use for VR is to have students build something themselves. “This can be a little compli- cated,” said Pfaff. “But if you do enough setup ahead of time, you can make a workflow that students can handle in a short amount of time.”
For instance, when the cellular biology class used VR to study the proteins that make up the internal structure of cells, students could have been shuffled into the 3D stereo lab to view the images, like watching the 3D ver-
Virtual reality can be an isolating experience, as only one person can be in it at a time.
