CMU School of Drama


Friday, March 02, 2018

ETC Students Create Collaborative Virtual Reality Experience

www.cmu.edu/news: A team at Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center is working to make virtual classroom field trips a reality.

"Most VR experiences today are quite isolating and I feel that collaborative experiences could help solve this problem," said ETC student Sharan Shodhan, a producer on Project Voyage.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Education is possibly one of the hardest things that a person can measure. This type of VR for the classroom, although still in its very preliminary stages, could combat the problems that people face with test taking. Learning by using virtual reality means that students can’t get distracted by things like their cell phones because looking at a phone would require exiting the experience. If students have to “follow” a path in the virtual space and can interact with the information that’s given, that could also mean each student is getting the same amount of information so there’s no discrepancy about what has been taught. I think this project worked really well for biomes, and could work for a lot of other similar areas, but for teaching something like calculus, I don’t think this would be the method to use. I do like the idea of interactive technology in the classroom, and I hope they can find a way to make testing less important through the use of this.

Jeremy Littlefield said...

No, no, no. This is the exact opposite of what a field trip is, it's about getting the students outside of the classroom and interacting with the world. Field trips should never be about putting on a VR headset and sitting in a poorly generated world. This is all happening in a day in age where we find ourselves at a crossroads between cool technology and our lives being taken over by this same technology. It is already hard to make kids go outside and explore and learn on their own. Why would we want to make it easier for them to get sucked into a digital world and shy away from interactions with humans and nature? Some of the best times in school growing up were on these field trips that would go away if VR experience were to take over and replace them all. I think like most that this is cool and allows people to escape when they are confined to a space, but it should not serve as an equal replacement for getting the students there in real life.

David Kelley said...

I have honestly never re thought of the idea of group VR but it honestly sounds pretty fascinating. The article states "What makes the Voyage project special is the team's careful attention to the experience design as well as the technical implementation of moderated group VR experiences," said ETC Professor Heather Kelley. "Through research and user testing they identified the social needs of their participants, and built the software's features around those aspects." this is also especially awe is the pretty damn cool fact that this VR software and experience is being developed at Carnegie Mellon. I could see VR playing a big role in the entertainment industry in the future and maybe even in the theaterical world, but to see what exactly the role will be would take far smarter minds than I to figure out. But eh this has got me pretty damn stoked for the future and what it entails.