TEACHxperts: VR/AR Experiences in Education: Immersive Computing on Campus
Light refreshments will be provided for this brownbag talk:
360 videos from CNN can take students to Siberia in the middle of winter, while social Virtual Reality (VR) applications can allow language learners to attend meetups with native speakers. Immersive computing platforms like Virtual and Augmented Reality (AR) offer opportunities for students to engage with complex information in new and different ways. When done well, VR and AR experiences are active, limit distractions, and place the viewer at the center of the story.
Ariel Rogers, assistant professor in RTVF, will discuss how she integrated AR and VR into her class. By partnering with Rebecca Poulson in the Knight Lab, Rogers’s students were able to experience a range of AR and VR technologies. You’ll learn about the specific technologies available at Northwestern and what resources exist to integrate AR/VR into your teaching practice. Benefit from the lessons Rogers and Poulson learned and consider how you might integrate AR/VR technologies into your course, regardless of subject matter.
After hearing from our TEACHxpert speakers, attendees will have an opportunity to experience VR technologies for themselves courtesy of The Knight Lab and Rick Salisbury from Kellogg School of Management. Attendees can also try low-cost headsets that utilize mobile phones and apps.
This talk is a part of the TEACHxpert speaker series.
About the Speakers:
Ariel Rogers is an assistant professor in the Department of Radio/Television/Film. Her research and teaching address the history and theory of cinema and related media, with a focus on movie technologies, new media, and spectatorship. She is the author of Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies (Columbia University Press, 2013) and On the Screen: Displaying the Moving Image, 1926-1942 (Columbia University Press, forthcoming), and she has published articles on topics such as widescreen cinema, digital cinema, and screens in venues including Cinema Journal, Film History, and montage AV.
Rebecca Poulson leads AR/VR projects at Knight Lab. In addition to being a software developer and playwright, Rebecca is an Oculus Launchpad Fellow and Mozilla Tech Speaker. She has taught WebVR workshops on three continents. Since 2016, the Knight Lab has been helping students explore these technologies through a combination of classroom projects, student employment opportunities and lightweight student engagement sessions.