Drawing on Ancient Arts and New Technology, Husson U. Launches Degree in Extended Reality — from edsurge.com by Rebecca Koenig

Excerpt:

The origins of the experience may come from an ancient artform: theater.

“As a set designer, I would think about experiences that are recreating augmented reality, essentially,” says Brave Williams, an associate professor at Husson University in Maine. “It is an augmentation of reality that has been done for thousands of years.”

Now, Williams is helping his institution push the boundaries of Shakespeare’s famous line that “all the world’s a stage.”

To expand the center’s reach, university leaders decided to build extended reality into the college curriculum. One example was the development of AR Stagecraft, an app that translates student set designs into an immersive experience of what the scenery would look and feel like if built on an empty stage.

Also see:

IEX CENTER — from husson.edu

An Innovation HubThe iEX Center /ai,?ks/ is an innovation hub that develops solutions using extended reality (XR) experiences such as virtual and augmented reality. Through the iEX Center, students learn how to solve real-world problems using the advanced technology associated with the emerging XR field.

These immersive and interactive experiences are developed with the involvement of students and faculty within the School of Technology and Innovation, as well as those from other colleges across campus as they work together on interdisciplinary XR projects.

 
 

16 Historical Roman Inventions That Helped Shape the Modern World — from interestingengineering.com by Kashyap Vyas
The technologically-advanced ancient Roman Empire has a rich history of inventions, some of which are still used today.

Picture of ancient road -- as part of an article entitled 16 Historical Roman Inventions That Helped Shape the Modern World

 

Henningsvaer at sunset by Yiannis Pavlis

 

Foster Partners Southern Dunes Hotel in Saudi Arabia -- the Red Sea Project

Foster + Partners’ hotel to be built amid Saudi Arabian sand dunes — from dezeen.com by Tom Ravenscroft

 

A beautiful image of a person silhoutted against the sun at dusk

 

Frank Gehry reveals latest design for supertall skyscraper in Toronto — from dezeen.com by India Block

Excerpt:

Frank Gehry has released visuals of a pair of twisting shiny skyscrapers, one of which will be over 300 metres, for King Street West in Toronto.

Currently named the Gehry Project, the plan is to build a 289-metre-high supertall and a 262-metre-high skyscraper at the intersection King Street West and Ed Mirvish Way.

Frank Gehry reveals latest design for supertall skyscraper in Toronto -- from dezeen.com by India Block

Also see:

Richard Rogers balances his final building over Provence vineyard — from dezeen.com

 

5 industries that AR is going to change in 2021 — from wikitude.com by Maria Stenina

Excerpts:

  1. Remote work and collaboration
  2. Education
  3. Toys and games
  4. Logistics and warehousing
  5. Architecture and construction

AR enables remote collaboration with stable two-way video and audio annotations that any team member can access on-site and in the office. Such technological advancements leave traditional ways of cooperation far behind and accelerate the adoption rate by construction companies and the open public. Imagine a construction company using an app to add a detailed view of the future building for the local community to inform and provide a communication and feedback channel. The same channel could be used in-house for the cross-team collaboration in real-time.

 
 

Many students complain that online-based learning doesn’t engage them. Well, check this idea out! [Christian]


From DSC…by the way, another title for this blog could have been:

WIN-WIN situations all around! The Theatre Departments out there could collaborate with other depts/disciplines to develop highly engaging, digitally-based learning experiences! 


The future of drama and the theatre — as well as opera, symphonies, and more — will likely include a significant virtual/digital component to them. While it’s too early to say that theatre needs to completely reinvent itself and move “the stage” completely online, below is an idea that creates a variety of WIN-WIN situations for actors, actresses, stage designers, digital audio/video editors, fine artists, graphic designers, programmers, writers, journalists, web designers, and many others as well — including the relevant faculty members!

A new world of creative, engaging, active learning could open up if those involved with the Theatre Department could work collaboratively with students/faculty members from other disciplines. And in the end, the learning experiences and content developed would be highly engaging — and perhaps even profitable for the institutions themselves!

A WIN-WIN situation all around! The Theatre Department could collaborate with other depts/disciplines to develop highly engaging learning experiences!

[DC: I only slightly edited the above image from the Theatre Department at WMU]

 

Though the integration of acting with online-based learning materials is not a new idea, this post encourages a far more significant interdisciplinary collaboration between the Theatre Department and other departments/disciplines.

Consider a “Dealing with Bias in Journalism” type of topic, per a class in the Digital Media and Journalism Major.

  • Students from the Theatre Department work collaboratively with the students from the most appropriate class(es?) from the Communications Department to write the script, as per the faculty members’ 30,000-foot instructions (not 1000-foot level/detailed instructions)
  • Writing the script would entail skills involved with research, collaboration, persuasion, creativity, communication, writing, and more
  • The Theatre students would ultimately act out the script — backed up by those learning about sound design, stage design, lighting design, costume design, etc.
  • Example scene: A woman is sitting around the kitchen table, eating breakfast and reading a posting — aloud — from a website that includes some serious bias in it that offends the reader. She threatens to cancel her subscription, contact the editor, and more. She calls out to her partner why she’s so mad about the article. 
  • Perhaps there could be two or more before/after scenes, given some changes in the way the article was written.
  • Once the scenes were shot, the digital video editors, programmers, web designers, and more could take that material and work with the faculty members to integrate those materials into an engaging, interactive, branching type of learning experience. 
  • From there, the finished product would be deployed by the relevant faculty members.

Scenes from WMU's Theatre Department

[DC: Above images from the Theatre Department at WMU]

 

Colleges and universities could share content with each other and/or charge others for their products/content/learning experiences. In the future, I could easily see a marketplace for buying and selling such engaging content. This could create a needed new source of revenue — especially given that those large auditoriums and theaters are likely not bringing in as much revenue as they typically do. 

Colleges and universities could also try to reach out to local acting groups to get them involved and continue to create feeders into the world of work.

Other tags/categories could include:

  • MOOCs
  • Learning from the Living[Class]Room
  • Multimedia / digital literacy — tools from Adobe, Apple, and others.
  • Passions, participation, engagement, attention.
  • XR: Creating immersive, Virtual Reality (VR)-based experiences
  • Learning Experience Design
  • Interaction Design
  • Interface Design
  • …and more

Also see:

What improv taught me about failure: As a teacher and academic — from scholarlyteacher.com by Katharine Hubbard

what improv taught me about failure -as a teacher and academic

In improv, the only way to “fail” is to overthink and not have fun, which reframed what failure was on a grand scale and made me start looking at academia through the same lens. What I learned about failure through improv comes back to those same two core concepts: have fun and stop overthinking.

Students are more engaged when the professor is having fun with the materials (Keller, Hoy, Goetz, & Frenzel, 2016), and teaching is more enjoyable when we are having fun ourselves.

 

Heatherwick Studio designs flood-resilient park The Cove for San Francisco — from dezeen.com by Eleanor Gibson

Heatherwick Studio designs flood-resilient park The Cove for San Francisco -- from dezeen.com by Eleanor Gibson

Excerpt:

Slated for completion in 2026, The Cove is intended to provide a new hub of activity while addressing rising sea levels threatening the waterfront site and also consideration [of] its history.

From DSC:
Many years ago, my wife and I spent several years out in the San Francisco Bay area. I was there to go through SFSU’s Multimedia Studies Program. I have many good memories from our time out there. I hope to be able to take that road trip in 2026!

 

Care over IP — from Inavate EMEA October 2020
Care over IP The Covid-19 outbreak has put working from home centre stage, but what happens when you work in a hospital? Paul Milligan speaks to those proving remote/virtual alternatives for patient care.

Care over IP [Inavate EMEA; Covid's impact on remote healthcare continues]

 

From DSC:
I continue to wonder how telelegal will be impacted by what’s happening with telehealth/telemedicine/virtual health…my guess is that telelegal will also grow quite a bit in the future. 


Addendum on 9/25/20, below is an excerpt from a press release sent to me by Ashley Steiger at AristaMD:

University of Colorado School of Medicine and AristaMD Partner to Expand eConsults to Community Providers

SAN DIEGO – Sept. 22, 2020 – AristaMD, an innovative telehealth platform that delivers primary care providers (PCPs) timely and documented specialist insight through eConsults, has partnered with the University of Colorado School of Medicine (CU) to expand eConsults to a network of community providers. The partnership begins with Salud Family Health Center, which has 13 clinic locations and serves communities in northeast and southeast Colorado.

“AristaMD is pleased to be working with our first partner that is a part of the Association of American Medical Colleges’ Project CORE: Coordinating Optimal Referral Experiences. We can support health systems, including those already using eConsults within their own electronic health records (EHR), to more broadly expand to clinics on any system,” said Brooke LeVasseur, CEO of AristaMD. “The AristaMD platform works with all EHRs, seamlessly integrates into physician workflows, and will allow us to scale to community providers throughout the state of Colorado as the partnership grows.”

 


Also see:

Model of the future

 

For New Orleans–based firm, architecture is a tool for design justice — from autodesk.com by Redshift Video

Excerpt:

When Bryan C. Lee Jr. was a boy, his family moved from Sicily to Trenton, NJ, and he was struck by not only the vastly different physical environment but also the ways different physical spaces affect people. It’s a concept that he explores today at Colloqate Design, an architecture and design-justice firm that focuses on civic, communal, and cultural spaces through the lens of racial justice.

 
 
 

Eight ways Virtual Design Festival has set the agenda for architecture and design — from dezeen.com

Excerpt:

After three months, two million video plays, over 600 posts and more than 50 live interviews, Virtual Design Festival [ended on 7/10/20]. From defining a new design movement to imagining new planets and urban wildernesses, here are a few of the agenda-setting ideas it raised.

Eight ways Virtual Design Festival has set the agenda for architecture & design

 
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