Page 26 - Campus Technology, May/June 2019

FEATURE Virtual Reality
nalism & Design and Theatre together at The New School (NY) in a class co-taught by liberal arts instructor Sara Montague and XReality Center head Maya Georgieva. Their task: to study — and recreate — that pioneer of “fake news,” the War of the Worlds radio broadcast, coinciding with its 80th anniversary. Students performed and filmed key scenes from a recreation of the event.
The XReality Center, which allows students and faculty to check out XR products and puts on workshops to help them learn how to use the technology, has also been behind initiatives to digitize nearly the entirety of the University Center campus in New York City, study classic pieces of fashion and capture stories of survivors of sexual assault and their journeys to healing.
3) Stagecraft for Theater Students
A project at Maine’s Husson University will help theater people visualize stage design for their productions. The university’s inte- grated technology department is developing AR Stagecraft, an app for iPhones and iPads that provides an immersive experience on an empty stage. Students in Husson’s entertainment production program are currently designing theater sets in a computer aided drafting class, which will be imported into the app to provide users the experience of walking through a set on stage before construction begins. This is just the first of many AR and VR proj- ects to come, promised the institution, culminating in construc- tion of an Interactive Experience (IEX) Center, which will be part of a new College of Business building expected to open in 2021.
4) Virtual Reconstruction of History
Since 2005, students and faculty from the University of Denver (CO) Anthropology Department have worked with members of the public to research, interpret and preserve Amache, a World War II Japanese-American internment camp about four hours south of Denver. While the project has long digitized objects linked to the site to make the work accessible to those who can’t visit physically, now a team is using drone image capture to produce a 3D recon- struction of the camp. Eventually, a composite of those photos will be used to feed a VR app that will allow viewers to move through the site via a headset, and an AR app that will let users hold up their devices and see what was there during the camp’s operation.
The Amache project is just one of many university-led projects to bring important sites back to life, particularly those tied to people underrepresented in history. Members of several depart- ments at the University of Arkansas, including Anthropology and Humanities, are leading a similar project to enable people to experience the Spiro Mounds, a gathering place for a large com-
An AR set design app allows Husson U visualize a set on stage before constru
VR helps astronomy students at San Di concepts that are hard to explain verba
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | May/June 2019
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