Harvard Business School‘s HBX digital learning initiative today launched a virtual classroom designed to reproduce the intimacy and synchronous interaction of the case method in a digital environment. With HBX Live, students from around the world can log in concurrently to participate in an interactive discussion in real time, guided by an HBS professor.
Built to mimic the amphitheater-style seating of an HBS classroom, the HBX Live Studio features a high-resolution video wall that can display up to 60 participants. Additional students can audit sessions via an observer model. An array of stationary and roaming cameras capture the action, allowing viewers to see both the professor and fellow students.
HBX Live’s virtual amphitheater (PRNewsFoto/Harvard Business School)
Convenience. I don’t have to travel to another city, state, country. That type of convenience and flexibility is the basis of why many learners take online-based courses in the first place.
Global — learning from people of different cultures, races, backgrounds, life experiences.
The opportunities are there to increase one‘s cultural awareness.
HBX Live is innovative; in fact, Harvard is upping it’s innovation game yet again — showing a firm grasp/display of understanding that they realize that the landscape of higher education is changing and that institutions of traditional higher education need to adapt.
Harvard is willing to experiment and to identify new ways to leverage technologies — taking advantage of the affordances that various technologies offer.
Anand, meantime, faces the images of 60 students portrayed on a curved screen in front of him, a high-resolution video wall composed of more than 6.2 million pixels that mimics the amphitheater-style seating of a class HBS tiered classroom
From DSC: I’d recommend that historians, geographers, geologists, archeologists — and many others as well — keep a sharp and steady eye on what’s happening with Virtual Reality (VR) — as the affordances that VR could bring seem very promising. Establishing collaborations with teams of specialists could open up some amazing learning experiences for learners in the future.
Virtual reality has been increasingly making its way into the museum experience. At London’s National History Museum, visitors can currently experience First Life, a 15-minute VR experience also using the Samsung Gear VR headsets, in which David Attenborough narrates a 3D journey depicting sea creatures from 500 million years ago.
Only a few major museums have hosted their own VR experiences, but several projects are working on bringing the museum experience to the masses using the technology.
Google recently launched its Expeditions project, allowing students equipped with a Cardboard headset and a smartphone to view materials from major institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History.
British Museum visitors will now be able to experience the past in a more vivid way. Apart from seeing the historical artifacts, you will be taken to the Bronze Age with the help of virtual reality headsets. You can don a Samsung Gear VR headset and explore a customary roundhouse from the Bronze Age. The exploration will consist of 3D scans of objects that are present in the museum. The museum is launching a VR weekend where this experience can be obtained.
… Recreation of Three Bronze Age Objects
Three Bronze Age objects have been digitally recreated and will be shown to the visitors through virtual reality headsets.
One is a gold object which was recently discovered and is still caked with mud. The second object is a splendid bronze Beaune Dirk, which is a princely dagger. However, its shape suggests that it was not meant to be used, as the blade was never sharpened and the end was also not attached to a wooden hilt. The third object is a twist of bronze which looks simple but is most enigmatic. Over 50 such loops have been found within 18 miles of Brighton. They were not found anywhere else in Europe. What they were actually, is still a mystery. Users will be invited to try a replica and provide their opinions.
Tech start up Alchemy Learning is using virtual reality as a tool for education.
“The ability to have a truly experiential learning moment has not been possible in traditional online education. Whereas with virtual reality you can see the students really are in a different world. They’re able to truly experience what’s around them,” Alchemy Learning co-founder Win Smith said.
“As an educator with 20+ years’ experience integrating technology into curriculum, it is exciting for me to see a technology that so quickly captures the attention of the students, motivates them to make the effort to learn the procedures, and then opens them up to the relevant content.“
-Larry Fallon,
Instructional Technology Coordinator,
Arlington County Public Schools
The past decade has seen exciting developments in learning space design. All across the United States and around the world, across seemingly every discipline, there is interest in creating new, active, project-based learning spaces. Technology-rich and student-centric, the new learning spaces are often flexible in size and arrangement and are a significant departure from the lecture hall of yesterday. These developments are not the result of any one factor but are occurring as the result of changes in student demographics, technology advances, and economic pressures on higher education and as the result of increasing demands from employers. The nature of work today is inherently team-based and collaborative, often virtual, and geographically distant. Companies are seeking creative, collaborative employees who have an exploratory mindset. Employers seek graduates who can be more immediately productive in today’s fast-paced economy. Colleges and universities around the country are responding by creating flexible, multimodal, and authentic learning experiences. It’s a complex ecosystem of education—and it’s evolving right before our eyes. What an amazing time to be in education and to be a part of the transformation of the learning space!
…
The next generation of learning spaces will take all the characteristics of an active learning environment—flexibility, collaboration, team-based, project-based—and add the capability of creating and making. Project teams will be both interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary and will likely need access to a broad array of technologies. High-speed networks, video-based collaboration, high-resolution visualization, and 3-D printing are but a few of the digital tools that will find their way into the learning space.
Figure 1. The T-Shaped Professional
Credit: Developed by IBM (Jim Spohrer, IBM Labs) and Michigan State University and
modified on March 16, 2015. Reprinted with permission.
The active learning difference
Through state-of-the-art technology, students spend their class time in active learning classrooms collaborating on assignments and solving problems rather than listening to lectures. Faculty become coaches and guides instigating thoughtful discussions and debates. Often, students watch faculty members’ online lectures before each class session begins.
Studies have shown that active learning classrooms and their settings allow students to learn up to three times more and retain greater knowledge, strengthen student-faculty relationships and improve student performance. Active learning also is proven to increase the likelihood that students in STEM disciplines will continue in those programs and removes the gap between the success of male and female students.
…
The flipped classroom can be associated with more collaborative, experiential, constructivist learning. “Faculty become coaches and guides instigating thoughtful discussions and debates. Often, students watch faculty members’ online lectures before each class session begins.”
6 Secrets of Active Learning Classroom Design — from campustechnology.com by Dian Schaffhauser
While the basic elements of active learning classrooms are well known, no one-size-fits-all template exists. Here’s how to achieve the custom fit your school needs.
Excerpt:
4 Questions to Guide Classroom Design
By next year, the University of Oklahoma will have nearly a dozen active learning spaces, up from one in 2012. Every single classroom looks different from the others, and that’s by design. Chris Kobza, manager of IT learning spaces, and Erin Wolfe, director of strategic initiatives, have honed their process down to four simple questions:
What’s the vision?
What’s the focus?
How flexible?
What’s the budget?
The process starts when they sit down with the person or people who want to redo a room to find out what they envision — is it maximum technology or maximum flexibility? “It’s a real casual conversation but you can learn enough about what their expectations for the space are, what the expectations for their faculty are, what they hope the students get out of the space,” said Kobza.
The power of Active Learning: “Many of today’s learners favor active, participatory, experiential learning—the learning style they exhibit in their personal lives. But their behavior may not match their self-expressed learning preferences when sitting in a large lecture hall with chairs bolted to the floor.”
From DSC: Don’t like the phrase “active learning?” I’m compiling a list of other words/phrases/thoughts that one can use:
Collaborating on assignments and solving problems
Collaborative learning
Actively engaged learning
Peer instruction
Thinking out loud with one another
Constructionist / constructivist learning
Developing real-world skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, negotiating, and teamwork
Students have the opportunity to work in groups, solve complex problems and be creative
Emphasis on small-group activities
Immersed in discussion
Flexible in size and arrangement
Experiences and opportunities to better understand the material
Students are extremely engaged in what they are doing, and their thinking is being refined.
Creating and making; creativity
Effective interactions of small groups of people within communal spaces
Putting the focus on students doing the work of learning
Increased motivation via more hands-on opportunities
Sharing / exchanging ideas
Participatory
‘The shift is changing the way teachers plan, present lessons and share information. Students no longer need to all do the same thing to learn about a topic. This change is enhancing the quality of work teachers are receiving back from students, and is creating an environment where students are involved in the creation (versus consumption) of content that aids their learning. “A major change comes in the direct instruction piece. As teachers, we’re moving from simply giving information and offering a passive learning experience, to serving as a facilitator and guiding student inquiries. This method is allowing them to be active participants in their own education,” said Alder Creek Middle School teacher Vicki Decker. (Source)
Addendum on 7/17/15:
Designing Active Learning Classrooms — from dbctle.erau.edu; with thanks to Tim Holt out at holtthink.tumblr.com for the original posting that led me to this resource Excerpt:
Active Learning Classrooms (also known as Active Learning Spaces or Learning Studios) are classrooms or other physical spaces designed with active learning in mind. In particular they are student-centered rather than instructor-centered. Students often sit in groups instead of rows to support collaborative learning, and some classrooms even have movable tables or desks. Students also sometimes have their own computers or tablets, and there may be multiple displays around the classroom, since students are not facing in one direction. Researchers have found that active learning classrooms have positive influences on student learning and engagement. Below are videos, examples, research studies, and assessment instruments related to active learning spaces.
While gamers wait patiently for their virtual-reality headsets to go on sale, there’s another industry ripe for the VR picking: movies. That means, as VR technology matures, filmmakers have to work out a new approach to their craft. But if they get it right, audiences are in for a far more immersive and interactive ride.
Companies like Samsung, Google and Oculus have been evangelizing VR cinema experiences, hoping to bring the sorts of videos that make their virtual-reality platforms a real destination for movie watchers. But to make their campaigns work, they need filmmakers and video producers who know what they’re doing.
“My students were able to apply their understanding of the technology to learning activities (labs, research projects, etc.) that could be made possible using virtual reality. For students to draw those connections on their own gives me hope that engineers, teachers, and students will be able to collaborate and create great opportunities for learning inside of a virtual world.” – Matt Cobb
“As an educator with 20+ years’ experience integrating technology into curriculum, it is exciting for me to see a technology that so quickly captures the attention of the students, motivates them to make the effort to learn the procedures, and then opens them up to the relevant content.“ – Larry Fallon, Instructional Technology Coordinator, Arlington County Public Schools
…
But ultimately, will VR become a proven medium to help students learn faster, be more motivated, and expand the boundaries of what is possible? Let’s take a moment to survey the state of the field right now and see what the future of virtual reality in education could look like.
Reilly’s football software is among a tidal wave of VR programs being developed for introduction to consumers in the next year. The military already uses VR in some training exercises, but the technology has potential uses in other areas, such as entertainment and home improvement. Architects, for instance, can create life-size virtual models of buildings rather than relying on traditional physical models.
…
Raymond Wong, a product analyst for Mashable, said: “I’m not sure if people want to put these goggles on at home. It’s a very isolating experience.” Indeed, total immersion in a world that occupies most of the users’ senses could lend itself to previously unseen consequences.
…
Wong sees more potential for VR in commercial industries such as marketing or engineering.
Research has already pointed to VR’s advantages in the medical field, Rizzo said. Once interactive intelligent agents — virtual characters — are advanced enough to respond like people, surgeons in training may be able to practice procedures with these characters. VR simulations could also be used as a way to distract patients from painful procedures, possibly becoming an alternative to pain medicine.
Education may also benefit from advances in virtual reality.
If a student struggles with conceptualizing the atomic structure, for instance, he could plop on the headset and be immersed within a virtual atom.
The development of new technologies and techniques, combined with the increasingly interdisciplinary approach of archaeological investigation, are producing results that, for the archaeologist of 20 years ago, might have been the stuff of science fiction. Who would have known then that scientists would resurrect in startling detail an entire ancient Roman town after only fractional excavation? And who would have known that thousands of people from nearly every corner of the world would be able to ‘walk’ through that town without ever physically setting foot within?
This, however, is exactly what has happened for an obscure archaeological site located in Portugal—a relatively small ancient Roman town whose few visible remains have attracted comparatively few visitors—at least as compared to the iconic Roman city of Pompeii in the south of Italy.
NeoS: The Universe This is a fantastic demo that takes you from the smallest level of scale (surrounded by protons and neutrons) through to the largest (galaxies and the observable universe). As you progress through the scales you are in first overlooked by a penny that seems the size of a building, before seeing it get smaller in front of you and other objects such as basketballs and a T-Rex come into view.
Mona Lisa Room
This is one of those ‘transport you to a location’ demos that a lot of people are starting to get involved with. It seems like such an obvious use of VR technology, and you can really see how the cultural heritage and museum sector is going to jump on this once the technology is commercially available. Essentially what you have here is a solo tour of a very famous art gallery room in the Louvre museum in Paris, complete with atmospheric and well-produced audio guides for a number of different paintings. Most importantly, it’s a VIP viewing – you are escaping the hundreds of tourists crammed into the small space for a personal experience taken at your leisure. Unfortunately, this particular demo really exposes the need for a higher resolution screen than the DK2 has at hand. The Mona Lisa is a small painting, and so none of the detail comes out which is particularly jarring given that the audio tour is talking specifically about how perfect the painting is. Even the massive wall-size Biblical painting nearby comes across as too pixelated to really engage with. It’s a concept that is going to take off in the very near future, but not until we get nice high-res screens!
Designing learning spaces for both online and on-campus delivery — from campustechnology.com by Dian Schaffhauser Purdue University found a way to create a flexible and inviting learning space for on-campus learners while also delivering high-quality audio and video recording for distance students.
Purdue’s new Engineering Professional Education classrooms are designed for lecture capture while providing a flexible space for on-campus students. (Photo by Phil Conrad)
How to create an AV standards document — from campustechnology.com by Mike Tomei Defining standards will help prevent audiovisual support headaches and keep your institution on the path to its strategic goals.
Excerpt:
Audiovisual technology is becoming increasingly complex and important in today’s classrooms. And with higher education IT departments being tasked with the design, installation and support of instructional AV systems — areas in which IT staff may or may not have expertise — it’s extremely important to develop, define and enforce AV system design/technical standards on campus.
The easiest way to do so is to create a comprehensive audiovisual design and technical standards document that can be referenced by all the parties involved with classroom AV installations. The goal of this document is to standardize AV installations across the institution, as well as streamline the design and construction process for these systems. A standards document will also help your IT department make progress toward the institution’s audiovisual strategic goals.
…
Many readers from state schools will recognize this scenario: A different audiovisual design consultant and systems integration firm are chosen for each project, based on the lowest bid. You end up with a revolving door of AV professionals installing equipment on your campus. They have very limited knowledge of your existing classroom systems, and what direction you’re trying to go in with new installations. This is a great reason to have an AV standards document written and ready to hand to these individuals at the beginning of a project.
…it’s all the more important to develop an audiovisual design/technical standards document that all parties can rely on.
And here’s a excerpt from part one, to help set the scene: “Most colleges and universities have some assemblage of ‘classroom standards.’ Many of them are poorly thought out, incomplete, and not as effective as they could be….For the sake of discussion, I’m going to break standards down into four areas to make their respective advantages and disadvantages easier to illustrate. In actuality, what you have on campus will (ideally) be a mix of all four areas — a combination of four types — compiled as one under the bailiwick of ‘campus standards.’”
The next group of standards I want to talk about I’m calling campus infrastructure standards. What I am referring to here are your building infrastructure items. Where do you need power, conduit, or data? What type of lighting zones or switching do you expect in rooms? Is there a particular lighting system you use or a particular interface your control system requires? What do you need from the building systems in order to build the teaching space? Where do you need it?
In addition, consider some current hot topics like active learning and flipped classrooms — where those terms undoubtedly mean completely different things to everyone at the table — and it’s clear why the responsible campus will want to steal a march and spell out some teaching-space-design ground rules in advance.
…
The four areas I will divide standards into — again, just for the sake of illustration — I call: industry standards, campus infrastructure standards, classroom design standards, and classroom equipment preferences.
For part three, let’s talk about what I am calling classroom design standards. These are the parts of classroom standards that speak most specifically to the “look and feel” of the teaching space. These are the guidelines that address types of equipment (in general terms), where those items should be located, and how they operate. Here we lay out the look and function of the room from the perspective of an end user. What does an instructor expect in the room and how are they are going to use it?
This information would typically include: How many projectors are there? Do you use monitors instead? What sort of writing surfaces, and how many? Is there a formal instructor’s lectern or console? Where is it? What sort of equipment will it be equipped with? What about podcasting or webcasting?
Using video for remote teaching/learning is now commonplace in higher education (66 percent), while flipped classrooms are becoming a widely used form of pedagogy (46 percent).
Seventy percent of institutions use webcasting for various purposes including teaching (47 percent), training (42 percent) and broadcasting live events (42 percent).
The June-July issue of The Teaching Professor newsletter highlights a study you don’t want to miss. It’s a meta-analysis of 225 studies that compare STEM classes taught using various active learning approaches with classes taught via lecture. “The results indicate that average examination scores improved by about 6% in active learning sessions, and that students in classes with traditional lecturing were 1.5 times more likely to fail than were students in classes with active learning.” (p. 8410) Carl Wieman, a Nobel-winning physicist who now does research on teaching and learning, describes the work as a “massive effort” that provides “a much more extensive quantitative analysis of the research on active learning in college and university STEM courses than previously existed.” (p. 8319) And what does he make of these results? “The implications of these meta-analysis results for instruction are profound, assuming they are indicative of what could be obtained if active learning methods replaced the lecture instruction that dominates U.S. postsecondary STEM instruction.” (pp. 8319-8320) That’s a long way from the guarded language usually found in commentaries on scientific results.
Also see:
Also see:
Also see:
3 key trends in campus AV technology — from campustechnology.com by Dennis Pierce With active learning environments on the rise, new AV systems support classroom collaboration. .
Why blogging is key to the future of higher ed — from campustechnology.com by Michael Hart A massive experiment at Virginia Commonwealth University involving 7,000 blogs could lead to a new view on how college students learn. Excerpt:
Using these blogs and other forms of social media, students could communicate with one another and with their teachers, and do much of their coursework online. At the same time, faculty members began to participate in intensive face-to-face Online Learning Experience training sessions, followed by an additional online component that could introduce them to a broad range of connected learning ideas and tools.
Google’s Cardboard Expeditions is the company’s plan to get Cardboard VR headsets in the hands of teachers, for use in classrooms. While most companies start with AAA consumer products, and eventually find a way to get said products into the educational market, Google is jumping straight to that point – letting teachers use the cheap headsets to take students on virtual field trips.
I went on one of those field trips today, during a demo session at Google I/O. We may have been a group full of developers and other members of the press, but for a few minutes we played the roles of kids taking a field trip to the Natural History Museum. It was a fascinating glimpse into the classroom of the future.
This “trip” consisted of 360-degree photos of various points in the museum: T-Rex skeletons, Alaskan Moose and the like. Our “teacher” (in this case, a Googler) talked to us through our headphones, indicating points in our virtual environments that she was talking about – through circles and arrows that popped up to nudge us in the right direction.
Here are some examples of the ways in which media outlets are leveraging AR:
National Geographic was early to experiment with AR—notably with its 2011 shopping mall experience that allowed shoppers to interact with dinosaurs. More recently, National Geographic has begun to leverage AR for educational experiences that enhance explorations of natural places.
Disney also offers an “edutainment” application of AR with its Disneynature Explore app, which offers kids a way to take adventures in their own backyards while learning more about nature along the way.
Conde Nast Traveler uses GPS data location and augmented reality in its iPhone Apps to allow travelers to find things and learn more simply by pointing their phone in a given direction.
Conde Nast is also among several media outlets—including Time Inc., The Wall Street Journal and Warner Brothers Interactive—that are working with Shazam, which can scan physical objects for augmented reality and other enhanced content.
Virtual reality headsets and content will be “the next mega tech theme” and a market worth more than $60 billion in a decade, according to investment bank, Piper Jaffray Cos. And as we increasingly see, mega tech themes quickly become mega media themes, as the two are intertwined in the minds—and devices—of consumers.
GoPro goes 360-degrees with new VR array — from zdnet.com by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes Summary: Think that having one GoPro camera attached to your car, helmet or skateboard is cool. How about an array of 16 GoPros that can capture 3D video?
StereoLabs announces huge hardware breakthrough: Human vision — from zdnet.com by Greg Nichols Summary: Earlier this month, a Bay Area startup called ?StereoLabs quietly introduced the first affordable high definition stereo camera. This is a big deal, and autonomous machines will never be the same. Here’s why.
Immersive learning is about to get a lot more real this fall with Expeditions – the new Google tool which will allow teachers to take students on virtual trips using the Google Cardboard viewer. Google reported that over 1 million devices are already in the hands of users from all ages. According to the announcement:
From the Expeditions app on their tablet, a teacher is able to send synchronized three-dimensional 360° panoramas to each student’s Cardboard viewer, pointing out areas of interest in real time and instantly pausing the trip when needed.
Expeditions will work to combine three things: a software platform, immersive virtual reality content and Android and iOS devices.
BERKELEY — UC Berkeley researchers have developed algorithms that enable robots to learn motor tasks through trial and error using a process that more closely approximates the way humans learn, marking a major milestone in the field of artificial intelligence. They demonstrated their technique, a type of reinforcement learning, by having a robot complete various tasks — putting a clothes hanger on a rack, assembling a toy plane, screwing a cap on a water bottle, and more — without pre-programmed details about its surroundings.
From DSC: In watching the video below, note how this presenter is able to initiate cameras/feeds/effects with a touch of a button (so to speak). What if recording studios could be setup for professors, teachers, and trainers to use like this? It could be sharp — especially given the movement towards flipping the classroom and implementing active learning based environments.
Does music education really improve kids cognitive skills? The answer, in our view, is hard to determine and it requires a series of longitudinal studies across different cultural and ethnic groups. However, certain small-scale studies such as the ones cited in the visual below do provide a preliminary evidence in favour of the correlation between taking music lessons and improvement in certain cognitive skills. For instance, in a study of 96 children aged 5-7 years old, those who received 7 months of supplementary music and arts classes earned higher mathematics scores than those with the schools’ typical music and arts training. In another collection of studies that involved a larger base of participants from high schools, researchers were able to identify a strong correlation between music instruction and higher reading test scores.
…
More specifically, the visual cites six key areas positively impacted by music education: math skills, reading skills, memory, IQ, SAT scores, and planning.
The press coverage of LinkedIn’s recent acquisition of Lynda.com for $1.5 billion has largely overlooked a key aspect of the deal. Yes, it integrates learning into a powerful social media site. Yes, per LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, it’ll “connect our members to opportunity,” giving them access to skills training that will enhance their careers.
But what does it mean to corporate e-learning? Lynda.com, based in Carpinteria, CA, used to be strictly a consumer company, but its strategy for the past couple years has clearly been to muscle into workplace training. What does the acquisition mean to market leader Skillsoft and other providers of online corporate learning? (Disclosure: I am the CEO of Rapid Learning Institute, an e-learning company)
Well, it’s an atomic bomb.
…
What’s different is that Lynda.com’s “content producers” know they’re creating a video, a medium that operates under a different set of rules from traditional learning vehicles. Content producers know that an instructionally sound e-learning module fails if people don’t watch it.
The most important thing Lynda.com does is find credentialed subject matter experts who speak comfortably in front of a camera. That’s a one-in-20 quality. Ivy League professors who excel in a classroom often look wooden on camera. You don’t have to be pretty. In fact, actors usually bomb in e-learning. You need to be credible and hold people’s attention by combining tight scripts and captivating delivery. Lynda.com’s e-learning, especially their soft-skills content, does it better than Skillsoft and other major players in the industry.
…
The message for corporate e-learning insiders is clear: The quality of content matters.
Traditionally—as in just a couple of years ago—collaboration was relatively limited to the display: from their laptops, participants in a meeting space could throw up documents and images onto a main display for everyone to see and, eventually, annotate. The prevalence of BYOD and scattered workforces brought mobile into the mix, enabling those who couldn’t physically attend a session to collaborate remotely, transforming smartphones and tablets into, if not primary, but secondary displays. As professionals grow increasingly comfortable incorporating these tools into their workflow, the concept of collaboration has expanded past the display and into the nitty-gritty of how organizations operate.
Programming a hologram sounds like something that should be done with some kind of special cybergloves on a computer the size of a ‘60s IBM mainframe. But at Build 2015, Microsoft has been quietly taking developers through the “Holographic Academy,” a 90-minute training session that teaches them the basics of building projects for its HoloLens augmented reality headset. I’m not a developer, but Microsoft let me and some other journalists go through it as well — and it turns out that basic hologram creation is, if not exactly straightforward, at least pretty understandable.
From DSC: Will designing learning-related games for augmented reality and virtual reality become an area of specialty within Instructional Design? Within Programming/Computer Studies-related programs? Within Human Computer Interface design programs or User Experience Design programs? Will we need a team-based approach to deliver such products and services?
I wonder how one would go about getting trained in this area in the future if you wanted to create games for education or for the corporate training/L&D world? Will institutions of higher education respond to this sort of emerging opportunity or will we leave it up to the bootcamps/etc. to offer?
New Demo of Microsoft HoloLens Unveils the Future of Holographic Computing — from seriouswonder.com by B.J. Murphy Excerpt:
What happens when you combine holographic technology with augmented reality and the Internet of Things (IoT)? Well, it would appear that you’ll soon be getting a hands-on experience of just that, all thanks to the Microsoft HoloLens. At the Build Developers Conference, Microsoft had unveiled the HoloLens and shocked the world on just how far we’ve come in developing legitimate, functional augmented reality and holographic computing.
A new “augmented reality” app will allow children from across the world to stand inside Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in Southwark.
The free app, released to mark the Bard’s 451st birthday, lets users create a 3D version of the theatre in the palm of their hands and explore inside.
It is one of the first uses of the latest augmented reality technology for schools and the first app of its kind created by a theatre.
From DSC: The article got me to thinking…it made me wonder about taking things a step further with the application of augmented reality (AR) as it pertains to the theatre.
Pretend that you are at a play or an opera. You could turn your mobile device towards the stage and zoom in on various objects, people, places. Image/object/facial recognition software could allow you to get more information about who is on stage at any given time (I’m not a fan of facial recognition, but this might be an exception for me).
Perhaps such an app could even provide language translation for you. Listening to an aria in Italian but want to know what the words are?Who is that villain over there in the corner of the stage and what’s his role in this story? What village or town is this act in? What’s the year?
Or perhaps one could find “Easter Eggs” within the app that might unlock further meaning for the story.
