Back in November 2018, Daniel Dyboski-Bryant and Lorelle VanFossen started a regular meetup of Educators in VR within AltSpaceVR. They’ve been meeting consistently for the past year and a half, and they’re currently hosting 5-8 gatherings per week. They held an International Educators in VR Summit across five different VR platforms on February 17 to 22, 2020 where they had over 170 different speakers in a conference that ran 24/7 for 6 straight days.
VanFossen wrote up a comprehensive “Lessons Learned from Hosting a VR Conference” post that documented their process for running a virtual conference, and their pioneering effort has helped to shape and influence the first wave of virtual conferences.
I had a chance to catch up with Dyboski-Bryant and VanFossen to talk about their journey of cultivating the Educators in VR, how they’re using immersive technologies for teaching, and the frontiers of using VR for education and learning. They’re available for hire in order to help consult or run virtual conferences.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So in today's episode, I'm going to be diving into educators in VR, talking to the two co-founders and community organizers, Daniel Dobrowolski-Bryant, as well as Laurel von Fossen. And they've been meeting since November of 2018. They've been meeting pretty regularly, now having up to five to eight events per week in different social VR platforms. So back when they were thinking about trying to celebrate their one-year anniversary, they got pushed back and then they ended up in February of 2020, they held this really significantly large international summit. It had over 170 speakers, a lot of it, about 80% of it was in alt space, but they also had Mozilla hubs and engage and roomy platform as well as the closing party and so many in space But they had basically 24 hours a day Talks going on for six days and what was at that point kind of like the biggest virtual conference with over 6,000 attendees and They're kind of an ad hoc group of educators from around the world that have been just cultivating this community, and they decided to have this virtual conference. And this was before the whole coronavirus lockdown had happened. And so they're really, in some sense, pioneering a lot of the different aspects of how to hold a virtual conference, kind of this first wave of what's it mean to do this translation. So I had a chance to talk to both Daniel and Laurel about their process of educators in VR, some of their lessons learned, and this first wave of trying to translate these different presentations, but what they're really interested in and trying to push forward what's possible for what education might look like in virtual reality. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Daniel and Laurel happened on Wednesday, May 27th, 2020. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:02.156] Daniel Dyboski: I'm Daniel DeBosky-Briant. I'm co-founder of Educators VR, a longtime educator. And when I tasted XR, everything changed. So I'm in it for the long haul. That's me.
[00:02:19.603] Bryant Lorelle VanFossen: I love it. Well, I'm, I'm Laurel Van Fossen and I'm co-founders with Daniel and I have a long history in digital storytelling and web publishing. And so the switch into VR came really natural many, many years ago. And then obviously tethered, I was, I had to use borrowed devices because I didn't have $10,000 laying around. So when the Samson gear came out, I had it within like three or four days of it being released. I had one in my hand and Then it was so busy because I was traveling doing keynotes and I was on a train. And so I put it on my head in a train. The gyroscope and whatnot, it tries to keep your face straight, but the train kept moving and I had a really horrible first experience with that. The train kept moving and yet my view didn't and I was squirming around in the train seat and I thought people thought I was crazy. But I discovered AltspaceVR three or four days later and over time met many educators that were exploring this. I was talking to several and I said, we need to get together, we need to have a meetup, we need to bring all these educators that are struggling. struggling to integrate immersive technologies into the classroom and have a discussion about it. And I said, we need to call it something like Educators in VR. And a couple of months later, We had the meetup and we thought like, I don't know what, 20, 30 people. Wasn't that right, Daniel? About 20, 30 people would show up. It was like 180 people showed up. It was amazing. We didn't even know there were that many people in VR. It was just kind of mind numbing thing. And a few months later we've made it official and we've been changing lives of educators and learners and, you know, researchers ever since. It's amazing the outreach of it.
[00:03:59.832] Kent Bye: What year or what day was the first meetup that you had?
[00:04:02.434] Daniel Dyboski: The first one was, I think, November 30th, 2018. Yep. Or October 30th, something like that.
[00:04:13.262] Bryant Lorelle VanFossen: Close enough. Yeah, one of those two. It might have been October.
[00:04:19.025] Daniel Dyboski: And I'd found a couple of researchers, professors, one from Australia and one from Germany, just showcasing their work. One of the professors was close with Laurel and put us in touch. We just hit it off immediately. I think Laurel's background in building communities, web publishing, blogging was ideal and my naivety was really perfect as well. We just went for it. Let's do something here.
[00:04:45.695] Bryant Lorelle VanFossen: Yeah, we threw them under the virtual bus.
[00:04:48.837] Daniel Dyboski: The demand was surprising. We went from once a month to twice a month, then once a week. I think, Laurel, how many events are we running at the moment per week?
[00:04:58.963] Bryant Lorelle VanFossen: Five to eight, maybe more. Five to eight a week. Yeah, a week.
[00:05:02.686] Daniel Dyboski: Those are kind of spread across different tracks now. And different platforms. We're then approached by people within our growing community, like people who we really liked working with and who were doing really great work in a particular area, like specializing. And we suggested, you know, why don't you actually develop within VR? Why don't you develop the conversation around languages for VR? Or coaching for VR? Or research in VR? We've developed a number of tracks all under the umbrella of Educated in VR. And I was saying how it's surprising how many different areas you can touch in VR under the umbrella of education. It actually reaches really far. So education could be schools, colleges, universities, but education can also be education about VR, can be the research side of things. So these tracks we've developed, you know, when we started out, it was just like, let's see who's out there. And as the community came together and gathered, then particular people we liked working with showed specialization. We said, you know, develop a conversation there. And each of these tracks are attracting their own conversation, which continue to be surprised by.
[00:06:16.068] Kent Bye: Yeah, and Laura, I don't know if you wanted to pipe in and add anything else there.
[00:06:20.251] Bryant Lorelle VanFossen: Well, just that it's so exciting to see people discovering these different groups and starting to beg for them. And as much as we can, we respond to that. So we're having new groups that are starting up that are focusing on content creation and art. the artistic aspect of this, which is again, wide topic, virtual world building, digital storytelling, is it actually bringing arts and gallery and things into virtual worlds, movie making, it's a huge topic. We also have a new one on cultural heritage and preservation in VR, and that's a gigantic topic. The idea of going in and not just doing 3D recordings to preserve these beautiful spaces, but actually converting them into VR content. so that they're educational and they're interactive and people can wander through the apocalypse, the acropolis, and they could wander through the apocalypse too. There's all kinds of, you know, it's VR, you can do whatever. But to go through these ancient libraries, there's a beautiful project we want to be involved with called Beyond 2022, which is the restoration in VR of the four courts in Dublin, which was burned to the ground, well destroyed terribly, over 500, 600 years of documents destroyed in that in Dublin. Dublin's Trinity College, working with the National Archives and all these other national groups and local groups in Ireland and the UK to restore this building for the 100th anniversary of the fire in VR and bring in the documents so people can actually enter into the building and have a curator there or a librarian or archivist who says, you know, I'm looking for this. They can point them out. Maybe it'll be AI. I hope it'll be a human being. Then they can walk through the building. and then actually find the document on the shelf where it would have been and open it up, see all these things are possible. And we love bringing people together to explore those possibilities. So if there's anybody out there with the Beyond 2022 project, come contact us because I'm such a fan of that.
[00:08:21.212] Kent Bye: And so I guess one thing with VR, and these immersive technologies is that they're still, you know, you have to have either Oculus Quest or, you know, a lot of PC and a lot of equipment. And, and also, we're in the midst of a global pandemic. And so everything is shifting already for people doing stuff at home. So I'm just curious to hear a little bit more of each of your background in terms of like, if you're actively teaching and using this day-to-day with students or your education background, and then also how you see the VR starting to be fused into what people are actually doing in the classrooms.
[00:08:52.778] Daniel Dyboski: That's really interesting because actually Laurel and I both use it. We have overlap, but use it in quite different ways. So I first started by approaching my manager. I got a mobile VR headset, approached my manager and said, I think this is going to be interesting in college. So where I work is a vocational training college in the UK. I teach English as a foreign language to migrant workers, refugees, and international students. I thought, you know, with 360 images and videos, so my learners, a lot of them have confidence issues with language when they need to go to the doctor, or they need to go to teachers at school, or they need to go to a bank or sports center. These, you know, when you're learning a language, it can be quite nerve-wracking to do that when you don't have the confidence. So I wanted to immerse them into those kind of everyday environments, practice the language there, so that they might have a better bank of experience when they go to the real world. So we tried that, and that was successful. I did some teacher training, ran a project with my students there, and then we got a bit more money at college to expand that project and just explore more broadly. So I was very fortunate to get some equipment. Oculus Go, Oculus Quest, PC VR, and really got free reign. to use it and take it into classrooms as I wanted. And then after about a half a year, I presented that to my managers, the whole group of the college managers, right up to senior management. And they were so encouraged by that, I got an even bigger budget. And I had just spent a whole lot of money on equipment and software. And it all arrived the week before lockdown. So here I was, they give me a nice space to move into with this immersive learning lab. to really support all of the departments in the college. So yeah, they could integrate it. When we had lockdown, the last thing I was able to do is get a bunch of quests into the hands of my colleagues and management. And so we've been running events in VR just for the college, like private events in all space. We try and get them into other platforms, like Engage and Rumi and stuff. So I'm kind of high and dry. I've got all the equipment, everything I need, just some really kind of high-end stuff. I'm ready to go. I'm ready to take this to students now, to staff training. And I'm a bit frustrated I can't do that. And of course, then Laurel will pick up in a minute that we also use it to teach remotely across the world. So my project is very local, regional here. And then also with educators, we use it to remote deliver workshops and trainings. And that's where Laurel's got loads of experience.
[00:11:32.797] Bryant Lorelle VanFossen: Could you share about the ENGAGE thing you did with the firefighting at River?
[00:11:36.199] Daniel Dyboski: Yeah, that's actually a really, really exciting one. So there's a company in the UK called River, which stands for Reality Inside Virtual Reality. What they do is high-end photorealistic photogrammetry models of anything you particularly want. They did an amazing project where they worked with fire rescue services. It took out a burnt out cabin, which served as a crime scene investigation model, and I did a photograph to capture that. Then we brought that into Engage, and then we invited River in, and we invited the California fire captain. commander of the Leicestershire Fire Department in the UK, all together in Engage. We brought the models in. And then because in Engage, you can set fire to stuff with the effects, we set fire to these models. And it was the most immersive experience I've had in VR because it was photorealistic. you had the models there. People actually learned to think like a fire inspector. When we had the experts there remotely from different corners of the earth, it was remarkable. And so actually, I think the 11th of June, we're running another event like that with River and photorealistic photogrammetry models around how to capture photogrammetry, how it can be used in education. So there's always something around the corner, always another way you can use it in VR. That's the two years of doing this. You never get to the end of what you can do.
[00:13:02.503] Kent Bye: Well, yourself, Laura?
[00:13:04.383] Bryant Lorelle VanFossen: Well, I teach about 20 hours a week. I'd like to shrink that down, but I'd like to expand it up. But about 20 hours a week in VR doing... Right now, because of COVID-19, we've been producing... I've developed a variety of events based on the lessons we've learned in three years of producing events in VR, specifically in alt space, but also in VR in general, because we also are on other platforms. So we're doing many educational and training events that are focused strictly on helping people to bring their event, bring their classroom, bring their workshop, bring their conference into VR. And those have been phenomenally successful with standing room only. It's been amazing. and we piecemealed it out because there's so much to learn about it. So we have a speaker 101 that teaches people about how do you present in VR, which is the same but very different than how you present in the real world, and how do you differentiate and learn those tips and tricks on how to keep what I say those virtual butts in virtual chairs, and then you know how do you actually host and moderate and moderation training, and then virtual conference discussions, and things along that line. Plus, we have an Educators in VR 101 to introduce people to the basics of starting to think about immersive classrooms and integrating VR into the classroom. I mean, the list is so long of all the things. Plus, in addition to that, I teach one of the hardest things there is to teach in VR, which I set this up as a challenge almost three years ago to teach writing, creative writing. being you can't write in VR, how do you teach writing and have people do prompts? So I tell people we write in the real world and then we share in VR, which adds a great deal of complexity. So historically, Just a little quick story on this. When I started teaching it, it was in alt space because at the time that was the most stable platform for things like this. And I did a NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month, where we met every single day in virtual reality. We're now heading into our third year doing that in November. And we get together and we write to try to meet a maximum of 50,000 words in 30 days. And so we're meeting every day and i'm saying here we're gonna write in the real world So push your headset up and we're gonna write the real world then mute yourself when you come back in you can share what you've written or whatever And I would watch one by one as people's avatars would go And just disappear in front of me Like okay and all those little demons that sit on our shoulders that say You know, you really shouldn't be doing this because you don't know what you're talking about and you think you're so good You know, all of those came up and they oh this sucks. This is not gonna work. I put so much energy into it found out, there was no quest at the time, the Oculus Go has a sensor in the forehead. And when you push it up in the C's daylight, it either turns off or goes into hibernation mode. And so we came up with this brilliant hack to put black electrician's tape over the sensor so that people could persist because they came back frustrated that the event was over or something happened. They couldn't hear or didn't know what was going on. They had to re-enter. And so we put tape over the sensor. Now, With the advent of the Quest, their whole UI has changed and they now have a setting where they can set how long it'll go before it turns off. And so it's auto-wake and auto-sleep. But that was frustrating because it was like 10 days before anybody said, yeah, you know, there's a sensor on the forehead. So you live and you learn and you figure out how to solve those problems. And that's the challenge of teaching in VR. as you well know, is what can you do, find those limits, push past those limits, and then when do you have to step back and how do you go? I was just helping someone who's getting ready for an event, one of our team members, and she said, test my world for the event. I came in and she had 167 megabytes. She's allowed 10. And 600 and some objects when she's allowed 200. So it's like, now we need to do some fixing. So we got we have some limits. Now we need to push back on the limits.
[00:17:12.380] Kent Bye: Are those limits for the alt space platform?
[00:17:14.562] Bryant Lorelle VanFossen: Yeah, when you when you create an event, in Altspace or anywhere, you have certain limits to make sure that all of the devices have access. So one of the reasons we love Altspace, we continue to support it, is because it supports everything from still Samson Gear, even though Samson's abandoning Samsung Gear, Oculus Go, all the way up to HoloLens and beyond. And when you support something that diverse, that agnostic, so to speak, with the devices, plus 2D, you need to design for the lowest device. So while we could do anything we want, when you host an event, you have to design for Oculus Go, you have to design for Samsung Gear. So there's certain constraints for public events. You build a private world, have at it, do whatever you want to, but for an event, it's different.
[00:18:03.443] Kent Bye: And I'm wondering if you could give me a bit of a backstory for how this Educators in VR International Summit that happened this year from February 17th to 22nd, where you had over 170 different speakers across many different platforms and Altspace and Engage and Rumi and SelmNymSpace. So maybe you could just give a little bit more context as to how this Educators in VR International Summit came about and what you were trying to do with that.
[00:18:30.032] Bryant Lorelle VanFossen: Because we were ignorant. We were ignorant. We were stupid. That's what it came.
[00:18:35.196] Daniel Dyboski: Yeah, the backstory about a year ago now, a good friend of ours, Chris Long, he passed away. And just before he passed away, we had a conversation at the time we were starting to do more events. And he was really excited about what we're doing. We were working on a shared project. And he just said, you know, when's your anniversary? We should do something really big. I have some really cool ideas. And then sadly, he tragically passed away, I think that very night. And we kind of left. And I shared this with Laurel, we had an idea as well. So why not do something big? It's a year coming up. Let's just bring people together. So we were going to do it in November. But things conspired against us over the summer. So we pushed it back a little bit. And we thought we'd go for February. We thought, well, let's go big. Let's see if we can get 30, 40 speakers. That would be crazy.
[00:19:27.562] Bryant Lorelle VanFossen: That would be really cool.
[00:19:29.103] Daniel Dyboski: We put out a call for speakers, and I think we were originally going to do it four days. And speakers just kept coming in. I think by the end, we had 170 speakers. We were like, what's VR? We can do six days. And then we started thinking about time zones, because every conference now, you've got to think, who's the audience? And our audience was like, we're doing it for the whole world. We naively decided, let's do six days, 24 hours, you know, we'll make it work. And it was literally just me and Laurel. We're like, this will be fine. So we scheduled all this and roundabout Christmas time, just after Christmas, it became apparent that this was going to be so much more involved than we had anticipated, but we were still, we'll make it work. And volunteers started piling in. Laurel was amazing at recruiting volunteers within our community. Speakers kept coming. We had no budget at all. So the backstory is passion and a healthy dose of naivety, because looking back now, it was crazy. It was absolutely crazy, but it was beautiful because it was spontaneous. And what carried it was the people coming together around it. If it had been like really shiny and well-organized, it would have had a different feel about it. But it became not our event, it became the community's event. And that's what really, I think Tom Furness said, he had been to Woodstock and he said, this was like Woodstock. And I was like, okay, that's coming from somebody like him. It was really moving. So that's a bit of the backstory. I'm sure Laurel has other things to add to it.
[00:21:01.285] Bryant Lorelle VanFossen: Well, he called it a happening. And I thought that was a beautiful description. And I was able to very, very early on recruit Donna McTaggart who is genius, keeping me on track and keeping things organized, and asking the hard questions. And that's what you need on your team is somebody who really just calls you right on your BS and says, Wait a minute, what about this? And it's like, No, I wasn't ready to look at that yet. Yes, you do and she really kept everything on track and on the ball and she's now one of our amazing team members and it was it was organic it was beautiful and I tell people that when you do a conference, there's two ways of doing this There first is the business way the corporate way. This is how we've always done it now we're just gonna jam this square peg into a round hole and do it in VR or there's more of Organic way of doing it, which is what we did, which was it's not always the right way to do it either, but it was a community coming together and we lost our video crew at last minute just conflict of times and abilities and things and the day before it started, we put out a call to say, we need anybody. We had people coming out of the woodwork, even during the event, people were showing up and going, I can film right now, just give me the rights and let me do it. And it's like, okay, which was a great thing. I think we're still collecting some of those videos. I don't know. It was amazing. But you know, we've created something magical within our community. So when you're looking at taking any of your events, converting them from the real world, into the virtual. Know that the same problems come through. You're going to have cancellations, you're going to have conflicts with speakers, you're going to have all the scheduling issues, people management, but then You have to work on event flow, world building decisions of where you host them, how you do it, user experience. There's many, many layers to this and it's really fascinating. Kent, we used your ethics and your little manifesto thing for part of our, we still are with our rules of conduct and stuff. Thank you for doing that work. It's beautiful. I'd love to talk to you more about that as well.
[00:23:21.507] Kent Bye: Well, for me, when I was both attending and speaking at this international summit, I just sort of noticed it by attending different things that there was a lot of technical things in the back end with alt space that needed, like you were like, you know, really at this scale that they really hadn't dealt with before. And in some ways, a prescient sign of things to come. Yeah. We stress tested it, yeah. You really stress tested it and really probably helped their own internal systems get improved a lot, just because of the high friction, I'd say, to be able to just get slides up and to be able to navigate them. I mean, it was like so many convoluted ways just to even get that working.
[00:24:03.116] Daniel Dyboski: Well, what was interesting is that the very week after the summit, pretty much COVID was starting to shut down conferences right around the world. And Microsoft itself called us up the week after. asking for advice and HTC called us up and said, how did you do that? Our Vive developer conference is shutting down. Can we talk to you about what you did and how you did it? And Laurel wrote up the most amazing blog about how to produce a virtual conference and what we learned along the way. And I think the timing, not only of it being a happening, but the timing of doing something so big that attracted so much attention, the week before so many other people like landed in the same situation, it just created We were being inundated with emails and calls for support and help. We've actually, as a result, taken on two other big events that were really, maybe we can mention them a little bit later, but that was amazing to have done something that is then also paving the way. for other people to follow. So that was really cool to feel that we'd contributed something in that respect as well, that it became feasible. People thought, well, they've done it, why can't we do it? And if you look at the number of events in VR now, it's crazy. I mean, we can't take credit for all of it, but I think paved the way a little bit.
[00:25:23.952] Bryant Lorelle VanFossen: Conferences workshops classes setting that that's a part of how I want to respond to this but watching people come in Literally in giant clouds like locusts Into vr and embracing it. I'm meeting people Constantly that find our event right away And I said, well, how long have you been in VR? What are you doing? You think about doing an event? They go, yes, I've been in for about five minutes. And I want to do this. And so the embrace of VR as a viable option, I think we proved it. From concept to production, we proved that VR is viable. We had no real world events at all for that. Well, we had one sort of tangible one. It was just, yeah, it doesn't quite count, but we had, where somebody was trying to present in the real, you know, in the real world at the same time they were doing our presentation. But that was, you know, their thing, but we didn't have any events in the real world. So it was one of the first, I didn't, we didn't set out to set any, break any records. But according to experts who keep track of this, including the AltSpace team, said this was the world's first and largest all virtual, no real world component events. And I was really stunned. We had over 6,000 event attendees. That's just kind of mind numbing to think about going 24 hours and all the management involved. But for us to then say, you can do this too. So we didn't hoard this information.
[00:26:50.620] Daniel Dyboski: Yeah.
[00:26:52.005] Bryant Lorelle VanFossen: You know, we really, really worked on sharing all this information for free. And we're also available for hire to make sure that people could transition into VR their own way. And I love that. And it's been wonderful to work with schools and businesses and governments and other agencies to help them see that this is viable. And I was just last night with the group of It's a company that specializes in providing training and resources for frontline workers in the medical industry. And they're looking at doing training sessions and simulation training and bringing people together and networking. And it's really beautiful that every kind of business is tapping into this. You've seen it. It's just incredible. I love it. And I love being a part of it. So hire us and we'll train you, we'll do you, we'll whatever. But we love it.
[00:27:41.176] Kent Bye: Well, one of the things that I came across when I was preparing for my talk at the Educators in VR International Summit was the SAMR model, the substitution, augmentation, modification, and then sort of reinventing. So as you go along, you're able to use technology to replace what was there before, like a one-to-one substitution with maybe a slight modification or slight augmentation. And then you go into the second phase where you're able to really redesign your tasks and be able to do things that you could never do before. And so I feel like there's a little bit of, we're still in that substitution phase of really trying to take the model of conferences and port it over one-to-one. And what I'm really curious about as all this moves forward, not only for conferences, but also for education in general, is to start to think about, well, what can you do with VR that you can't do in other mediums at all? And maybe a lecture is better to see in 2D, and what is it about being live with somebody? Is it the panel discussion? Is it the live interaction? Is it the spatial medium that you can understand something? Is it about locomoting through a space? Is it about expressing your agency in some way? So I'm just curious to hear some of your thoughts when you think about this trajectory as you start to integrate technology, how you navigate this SAMR model of slowly trying to replace what was taken away with the pandemic, but also trying to use each of the different tools with what their best affordances might be.
[00:29:06.023] Daniel Dyboski: Yeah, so I think first thoughts on that is our members are, some of them they've been in VR for years and others are just coming to it. So our approach is to try and look at it like a spectrum. What's possible isn't always appropriate for somebody starting out. So trying to find tools that are appropriate for where people are at is really important. And people have different needs. Like we have people who want to host remote workshops and teach in VR. And other people are there with a K through 12 class and they have students and they want to integrate VR into the curriculum to supplement it. And it will always only be supplementation. In that situation, they may not need any social VR. They might be in social VR to take part in the workshops, but their students may just have access to single user curriculum aligned VR content. So there's like a three dimensional spectrum. Are you teaching in VR? Are you teaching with VR? And then where are you at on your journey? Because while it's possible to create a social VR experience on the surface of the moon, like you were at Kent at the summit, where you can set fire to a forest to demonstrate bushfires, or you can have shared 360 videos like bells and whistles experiences, it's not always appropriate for my person starting out. So for me, the possibility of collaboration in all its forms, whether it's in education, teamworking, communities in VR, that is incredibly powerful. And when you were talking about the feeling of agency and presence, I have a friend in VR, Chris Madsen from Engage, and we hang out in Engage every now and again preparing for something. And when I take my headset off, it's a job, a physical job, because I've felt I've been with them. Even if we're not actually doing anything particular, it's just the level of immersion with that friend in VR. is so powerful. That alone for me, you know, you take many of the other things away, but that alone, that level of connection with a friend in VR, never met him, is valuable beyond words already. So friendship, community, relationships, relationships are the foundation of learning, I think, as well. So.
[00:31:23.930] Bryant Lorelle VanFossen: And I agree, I agree. And collaboration, I would add collaboration to that. I have, Samer and I have a long history of battling that model, because I think of it as something that is a continual process. You're constantly, you know, the reiteration process is a constant process in VR, rather than huge steps. And when you mix that with Bloom's taxonomy, VR serves Bloom's taxonomy in a beautiful way, because it allows you to create an immersive experience, tapping on all of the different modalities, the learning modalities. So it can be contextual, it can be, you know, visual and all those, and audible. And when you bring all of those together, you increase engagement, you increase, you know, you're seeing the research. And it's really amazing to watch the wow effect. And you keep wondering, when is the wow effect going to become boring and be absorbed in and go, okay, well, now I'm going to take it for granted. It takes a while for that to happen, but how does that affect the memory retention research that's being done and the increase in engagement and presence and embodiment and all those things? But what we're finding, I wish I had the research right in front of me so I could call on it, but what we're finding in general, and Kent, you know this as well from all the work that you've done, deep diving into why this works is that when you look at a screen for online conferencing, like it's boring really, really fast, and we're getting zoom fatigue and things like that. But when you're engaged, and you have the headset on, you lose the distractions that around you, you need to pay attention to where you are. And when you're immersed in that experience. And then you're introduced to things that are simulation based, that are dangerous, that you can't do in the real world, like walk inside of an engine or stand inside of a pumping heart, things like that. You're showing people things in a different way that really changes the wiring in the head. So I often, I tell all my students in when I'm doing training that if you want to get someone's attention, you either need to show them something they've never seen before or show it to them in a way they've never seen before and VR allows us to see something in a way we've never seen before and that is where the secret sauce and the magic happens combined with this other little less academic thing which is If you really want to reach minds, you need to go through the heart. And most of all, you need to go through the little kid that is within all of us. And when you can connect with that inner child, that's when real magic happens. I mean, think about Harry Potter. Harry Potter, the whole series and everything was phenomenal, not because kids went out and bought the books. It's because adults went out and bought the books. They read the books, they shared them with their kids. And they went, maybe, maybe they shared them with their kids. Because everyone has a wizard inside of them. I don't care if you're 80 or 90 years old or you're 10 years old, you have a little wizard sitting in there going, if I just had a magic wand, and I could wave it once. VR gives you that magic wand. You have that opportunity to step into magic and make magic happen. That's a game changer in education, I think.
[00:34:49.824] Daniel Dyboski: I wanted to add something to that, actually, that you triggered there, Laurel. In the summit, I think our approach was invite speakers, and by inviting speakers, then you get presentations. That's the kind of the format that a lot of the summit took on, which was valid and very successful because it's something we could manage in that sense. Laurel and I both, we debriefed afterwards. We said, well, what would we like to improve on? And I think the presentation in VR was kind of a natural first step because it's a recognized part of any conference. But the opportunity to develop more content that doesn't have any presentations, if you take presentations away from some of what we do, You can explore worlds that can represent immersive learning environments. You can maybe go to more different platforms, like the Museum of Other Realities is an amazing one. You can have performances in VR. Yet, we then started looking at how would we reduce the number of just pure presentations, and what would we put in its place? And Laurel and I both have been developing that since the summit a little bit. So, for example, that event in Engage with the river models, there was no slides at all. I think we had a video playing for like two minutes of video, but it was models, the people, the speakers, the interactions, and the spaces that we were in. And that's what I'm most passionate at the moment. It's like, can we get away without a presentation? Can we have a really valid learning experience without a slide deck? And it's a challenge, but when we do it, I've never been disappointed for trying.
[00:36:32.135] Bryant Lorelle VanFossen: And we've found that the most immersive experiences are the most memorable experiences that people have in immersive environments are when their conversations, when their engagement, when their interactivity and not slideshow productions. And yet speaker after speaker, after speaker, after speaker, they come in with their PowerPoint and they want to do their thing. They want to do it and they want to keep doing traditional. It's really hard to break that model. For a lot of academics, the slides are a crutch. My script is on the slide. I can't do this without my script. Well, then know what you're talking about and live your passion and teach your passion. Share that, you know, just let us be more organic. It's really fascinating to see the pushback.
[00:37:12.583] Daniel Dyboski: What I wanted to say just briefly is I think it's because also the way that conferences that are going online are inviting speakers for presentations. That's how they're presenting. They're not saying, hey, we're putting on an event and bring us an experience. They're saying, bring us slideshows and a talk. And then that's what you get. So you get what you ask for. But I think that's partly the result of where we're at. You know, the summit, crazy to think it's only, what, two or three months ago. and we've learned a lot since then, and people are putting on conferences now. They still have to deliver something that's known to them. They're already choosing a new medium for them then to say, right, we're not going to do presentations. They don't have experience of VR. And now they're also leaving the thing that is recognized and known to them. That would be a double whammy. So I think we'll see more of that innovation coming, and I'd like to be a part of driving it. But I think for the time being, big players like Microsoft and HTC that just still need to get their conference done.
[00:38:16.458] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's a completely opposite model, the normal conference model of speakers of the one to many broadcast model, it's called the unconference, which was like the bar camp, you know, style where it's emergent in terms of the schedule is not even determined until the people show up and they put on a grid what they want to talk about. So it's, it's from the people. And so I like, I see that that type of bottom up interactions or work really great in VR, the birds of a feather are amazing. it's like a focus group of people that are trying to solve the same problem. And you're able to have this really highly engaged interactive conversation. High Fidelity just launched with their audio spatialization, which allows you to have this lightweight, just an image, but still have that kind of emergent conversation. So I feel like a blending of those two models, because I'm guilty with the other speakers of wanting to give a talk, and I gave a whole talk, you know, But I think the thing that I'm actually more interested in now is experimenting with different social dynamics. How can we use VR? And oftentimes, a lot of conferences will just have a bunch of speakers and they will have no interstitial hallway spaces. I think with the International Summit, there was maybe one or two explicit social hours. But in terms of what was on the schedule, like how much social time is there? AWE is happening right now. Again, no hallway, no interstitial way to kind of talk to people and no social events. And so, yeah, thinking about both the value of connecting people and having unstructured and structured time, but also figuring out like, how can you actually do this group collaborative, whether it's the flipped classroom model where they watch a lecture beforehand, and then when they get in there, then they're really hands on and engaged. But I see that there's a lot of different models, and I think it's still evolving as to what that exactly looks like of using all the affordances of each of the mediums that if you do want to have a 10-minute lecture, maybe you watch it before you all gather together. So those are just the things that I've been thinking a lot about. I agree.
[00:40:07.503] Daniel Dyboski: I think also we're working within the constraints of the platforms that we've got. So some platforms can do certain aspects of that well. Other platforms can do others better. And again, the conferences we're seeing now are people who, for the most part, are new to social multi-user VR, like AWE, obviously one of the leading conferences going in the space. But when we, when Laurel and I were there with Andy last year, Andy Fidel approached them and said, let me run a social VR program for AWE. And they had no interest in it. really social and multi-user VR only really came of age for masses with the advent of the Go and the Quest now. So it's really, really, really early days. And COVID-19 is two months old. So all of this raft of people who are in, that's the first wave of conferences that are trying. Everybody's going to go away, make mistakes and learn. And it's going to take iteration after iteration after iteration and some thought leaders and people willing to fall flat on their nose and try something different. And then also platforms that can deliver. So for example, Altspace has brought in some great new features. Engage is going to be able to hold up to 70, possibly even a hundred people per room and do mirrored rooms for live events. These kinds of things then give you affordances that you couldn't do a couple of months ago. So these next few years, the acceleration the need from COVID-19, the investment going into this space, the people developing, the community coming together. It's going to be a really interesting few years.
[00:41:45.107] Bryant Lorelle VanFossen: And I hate saying this, but we are also planning for going back into self-isolation. So we're starting to come out, but that's a concern that this fall, this winter, this is going to be, you know, repeat itself again. And we are preparing for that with a variety of different things, because again, it's the shotgun approach. We're just going to throw everything at it and hope that something hits. But because it is a new world, and that's what's so exciting about Educators in VR is we get to work with some of the most amazing, creative pioneers that are breaking the rules and pushing things forward. And we're all coming together. to we have over almost 3 000 members i think maybe more i haven't checked lately i'm not a number watcher because i'm going to work with the 10 people in the room who i who want to work with me not the 5 000 that i only have 10 that really want to work with um yeah the lurkers i don't want i want to you know so we have this amazing active community that is coming together to reinvent the wheel in many respects the virtual wheel And I'm really looking forward to seeing what's happened. It's really amazing. And I don't want us to go back to isolation. I don't want any of that. But we, you know, businesses need to prepare for that. And because this may be a new normal for a while. And education needs to prepare for that. Oh, beyond belief. It was stunning to talk to academic representatives who said, we are so impressed that our university, in 24 hours, we were able to flip a switch and just move all of our classes online and work. And I'm like, Yeah, isn't that great? You've got well-funded massive servers. You got all that. That is beautiful. And other schools are going, woo, it's been three weeks and I don't even have a computer. So, you know, we need to be ready for that. Academia needs to be ready for that. And Educators in VR is helping to prep people to be ready for that. And isn't it stunning? Are you seeing the news of how many schools have announced that they're going totally online this fall and not even going to have classes? I just have, in my imagination, I'm seeing blackberries and weeds coming up over the schools. It's scary.
[00:43:56.938] Daniel Dyboski: My college, we're pretty much gonna be doing blended learning. And this college VR lab that I'm developing, I'm buckling up for a lot of demand from that as well. I think, yeah, the timing of this is amazing if you think, you know, the community coming together, that summit, COVID-19, the outlook where we are now, And when we say getting ready for this, I think just being willing to explore and experiment. There's still a lot of playing, testing, trialing we need to do before we return around and can meet even a fraction of the need on a global scale. It's going to be like threshold. For me, there's this concept of threshold where VR, in theory, can do a lot. but people can't access it in mass yet. So in the meantime, how close can we get them in 2D to virtual worlds and avatars so that when the devices come through, maybe the money comes through, the support comes through, that they have a taste and understanding. And it'll still be amazing. You know, it'll still be a real experience when they go from 2D into VR, but we need to work on that threshold so that when, as the devices come through and people get into VR, we're already meeting people halfway.
[00:45:14.908] Bryant Lorelle VanFossen: I call it the gateway, 2D is the gateway drug. I also want to talk about our students and really quickly about our students in VR program. And we just had the students in VR conference. And of course that happened, you know, we're like, can we do this in COVID? The schools are closed. We planned it before COVID hit, schools closed. Now, like, do we go forward? And students around the world stepped up and teachers stepped up and went above and beyond the call of duty. We even had one of the producers of the event, Angelina Dayton, in order to update the Quest, it needs to be plugged into a computer. The morning of the conference, there was an update with Quest, and she went to the student's house, got, you know, very carefully with self-isolation as best she could, got the headset, drove an hour to the school, got it updated, brought it back to the student in time so that the student could present, because this was a student-led and student-presented. But the students, their creativity to find a way to connect and participate and do, it isn't just from the top-up administration and teachers. The students are coming up. They want to do homework in VR. They want to do research projects in VR. It's really amazing. It's coming at it from both directions. I love that educators and the VR is right there in the middle. We're that connective tissue. We can help the businesses, we can help academia, we can help the students to move into this new phase. You can tell I love this too much.
[00:46:44.660] Kent Bye: Well, just to kind of wrap things up here, I'm curious to what each of you think. What do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:46:56.343] Bryant Lorelle VanFossen: Hologram. I mean, holodeck. I want a holodeck. That's it. We're heading to holodeck. I want it now. Mostly because I don't like to dust. I don't mind vacuuming, but I don't like dusting. So I want a hologram home. I want a hologram everything. It's heading there.
[00:47:11.686] Daniel Dyboski: Well, for me, I would love if this amazing tool can help us be more human together. If it can help us remember what's best about us and bring us together to help, you know, tackle some of the common global challenges we have right now. If a tool can really help us do that at scale, and we could be a part of it, that would be amazing. I think, yeah, to help us be as human as we can because and easy to get distracted by the shiny tech, but really it's about people, relationships and community.
[00:47:50.704] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, I'm really inspired with all the work that you've been doing and really cultivating these communities. And education is one of those fields that often is underappreciated, underfunded. And I know that you're doing a lot with not a lot of resources, and hopefully you'll be able to find enough people to help hire you to do these different events so you continue to sustain yourselves and to grow. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:48:18.586] Daniel Dyboski: Yes, please. So two things. One, in about, well, June 21st to 25th, we're producing iLearn 2020, which is the Immersive Learning Research Network first online VR conference over four days, I think four or five days, which we're really excited about. We've partnered up with them. So please find out more information on the iLearn.com website. That's the first thing. And then we've also partnered up with an organization called Bridging the Gap, who are running the world's first VR youth takeover of the United Nations General Assembly. So for two days, end of September 28th and 29th, we will be producing a VR event where the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, will be the opening keynote speaker. We are signing up to 50 VIPs to do performances, maybe music and dance performances, to have VIP youth mentors, give live breakout innovation mastermind workshops. And we could not be more excited about that because this whole effort is around the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The idea is to bring the generation of today and the leaders of tomorrow together with industry leaders, policy leaders, and inspiring people to not only learn, but to take ownership of leading on global challenges. So the UNGA, the United Nations Youth Takeover of the General Assembly, 28th and 29th of September. Massively excited about that. And anybody who wants to, you know, support this or sponsor this event, please get in touch.
[00:50:01.034] Bryant Lorelle VanFossen: That's going to be groundbreaking. I am so excited about that. And if anyone wants to explore the potential for virtual reality, augmented reality, XRM are all the initials, all the acronyms that are out there. please come join us at educatorsinvr.com and you'll have links to our Discord. Our Discord is rocking. We have so much activity on there. It's just amazing. And on Facebook and Twitter and everywhere else. And we'd love to have you join the party because it is, it's about all of us taking that step forward and being brave and finding those. You have to find the like minds and you take those two brain cells, you rub them together, sparks happen. I love it.
[00:50:41.335] Kent Bye: Well, Laurel and Daniel, I just wanted to thank you for all the pioneering work that you're doing, both in the conferencing and exploring the frontiers of education and VR. And yeah, just for joining me here on the podcast today. So thank you. Thanks, Kent.
[00:50:53.914] Bryant Lorelle VanFossen: And thank you. And Kent. I love you. You are one of our absolute superheroes when it comes to evangelizing all this XR technology. So thank you for everything that you do. Really appreciate it.
[00:51:07.866] Kent Bye: Yeah, thank you. That was Daniel Dabowski Bryant, as well as Laverale Van Fossen, and they're the co-founders of Educators and VR. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview, is that first of all, well, I love how just open both Daniel and Narell are in terms of using the Altspace platform. And hopefully at some point, looking at other things like Mozilla Hubs, as well as High Fidelity, I think are other things to really get people into using these different types of immersive technologies. But to have the full range of everything from the Oculus Go to the Samsung Gear VR, on up to the Oculus Quest and, you know, PC VR and even the HoloLens in some cases. So they're trying to pick these platforms to have the most access. When we're talking about education, it's like you are trying to see how can you support somebody who might be on the Samsung Gear VR or Oculus Go. I don't typically hear a lot of other people within the VR community that are really trying to be that open in terms of supporting all these different platforms. But for Altspace, they definitely have been one of the leaders in terms of trying to implement all of this cross-platform compatibility. What that does mean is that whatever experience you're designing has to design for that lowest common denominator. But if you are trying to bring in as many people as you can from around the world, then it's a design trade-off that you are then having a lower fidelity experience for people who may have the full room scale gear with a PC or VR. But I'd say that a lot of these different events, you just want to have as many people there as possible. And you have the network effects of those gatherings becoming much more valuable, the more accessible that they are. So I really appreciate that that's been a strong focus for them and that they've just been taking this whole emergent grassroots approach, which was to provide an opportunity to people to come together and to connect these communities from around the world for people who are really trying to be on the front lines in the trenches of trying to integrate these immersive technologies. And it sounds like Laurel is doing a lot of the training herself. And then Daniel Dabowski Bryant is looking at how to use virtual reality technologies for vocational training at his college. But yet, at this point, since everything has gone virtual, they've been getting requests from around the world to be able to help them give advice and provide information and context for how to pull off a virtual conference. There's a pretty comprehensive blog post that Laurel did tracking all their process of basically pulling off this event on a budget that was around $500 to $600. It really wasn't that much out of pocket expenses. That said, there's a lot of stuff that they're using these free platforms like Altspace VR, and really stretching the limit of what the Altspace platform was able to do. I mean, I know that they were able to put two to three different events into one event with an alt space rather than flooding their entire scheduling system with all these different events. So 170 talks, about 80% of them were in alt space, but a lot of those had to be clustered together in order to not overwhelm the scheduling system with an alt space. I had a chance to talk at that conference and really dive into a lot of different aspects of learning theory. And it was cool to be able to talk, but now that that was really the first wave of these virtual conferences, I'm less inclined to just give a talk and want to try to experiment more with how can we do different innovative things with these social dynamics and to experiment with these different platforms. I've personally been a really big fan of the relaunch of High Fidelity, and I'll be diving into a few conversations that I had with Philip Rosedale, both from last year, before they'd made the pivot into spatialized audio, and one just more recently, where on the day of the launch, being able to test it out. been able to hold some some after parties. And the one thing that you miss in virtual conferences is people in the hallways, just kind of casually being there, they're committed to being a part of the conference, but maybe they don't want to be in all the sessions, and they want to just have the larger conference set a deeper context, so that if they want to talk to other people that are also interested in the same topics, and they can have some really highly interactive conversations. And so Looking to the future of, Laurel was saying, the higher ends of Bloom's Taxonomy is all about this participation, collaboration, creation. It's not about just a mere understanding. It's about putting it into practice and to actually make and create stuff. I also have an interview with Erica Southgate, who found similar things in terms of the real affordances of virtual reality was to create a platform to enable people to actually create and make stuff within it, but also to be able to teach their fellow students. So to use the platform itself to be able to teach other people. So Daniel Dabowski Bryant was talking about using the Engage platform, putting a photogrammetry of a cabin that had burned down, and then to have fire chiefs from around the world come in and to actually kind of recreate the fire within virtual reality, but then to use their investigative skills within the context of this actual photogrammetry scene to be able to then use that as a teaching opportunity to be able to show what folks would be looking for. So starting to not think about the presentation as a slide deck, but to think about an experience, like an entire experience that you're trying to give people within a virtual reality experience, how that becomes the platform itself for being able to communicate what you're trying to talk about. So thinking about it more as a guided tour or as an experience rather than just a presentation. So I think that's some of the direction that they're going in. And I'm excited to see where they take some of these other virtual conferences. And this whole United Nations collaboration with the youth taking over the General Assembly sounds like a pretty interesting project as well, especially with the Secretary General of the United Nations giving the opening keynote. So that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
