Play episode

#1: eVRydayVR on Virtual Reality evangelism, communities & education

May 5, 2014by kentbye

I’m joined by Chiara Coetzee of the eVRydayVR YouTube Channel to discuss:

  • Virtual Reality evangelism
  • VR design tips
  • VR communities
  • The future of VR and Education

Here’s a link round-up and overview of topics discussed:

Get in touch with eVRydayVR on YouTube and Twitter and Facebook and at gmail.com.

Music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio

Share this
FacebookXRedditEmail

Rough Transcript

[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.

[00:00:11.897] Chiara Coetzee: My name is Dee and I operate the Everyday VR channel on YouTube and it's kind of a mixture of content. My original goal was just to kind of spread excitement about VR and to try and get lots and lots of content out and just put out a new video every single day. And Probably my most popular videos have been videos that teach people about technical topics regarding the Oculus Rift in particular. Pretty much every single video involves the Oculus Rift in some way, but most of them are actually gameplay videos. One thing that I haven't seen a lot of other channels do is complete Let's Plays of longer games, like, say, Half-Life 2, and I've actually completely gone all the way from beginning to end in Half-Life 2 and shown that in the Rift, UFDA native support.

[00:00:57.089] Kent Bye: Wow, yeah. I think I first heard of some of your videos from the barrel distortion video that you did, which was really great. It actually helped me really visualize the screen when I was editing or just watching and kind of really understand what happened. Maybe you could just sort of give a brief overview of barrel distortion and what it does.

[00:01:16.247] Chiara Coetzee: Sure. So the Barrel Distortion video was the second of three technical videos I've worked on. You've probably seen my Time Warping video, which was the most recent one. The first one was one about Crystal Cove and particularly focusing on the low persistence feature and how that works. The best, simplest way to visualize Barrel Distortion, at least as it was done in the original Oculus DK1 SDK, is as a radial distortion where you're drawing a series of equally spaced circles on top of the image, kind of like an archer's target. And then you're performing a transformation in which the circles that are the farthest out are being drawn inwards towards the center. And the farther you go out, the more they're drawn inwards. So they get packed more and more closely together. And that's why rectangles, for example, end up looking more like barrels because the corners of the rectangle are farther away, so they get pulled in farther.

[00:02:09.548] Kent Bye: Right. And I'm just really curious if you could maybe talk a bit about your background and how that is sort of impacting your commentary on the VR field.

[00:02:18.371] Chiara Coetzee: Sure. So my background is I have degrees in math and computer science from George's Institute of Technology, master's degree. And after that, I worked as a software engineer at Microsoft for about five years. And I always had interest in pretty much all areas of computer science, but particularly ever since I was a kid in VR. I remember like when I was like 11 years old working on games in C in DOS and like reading Michael Abrash's book, which is Zen of Computer Graphics, I think it was called. And I've always been a gamer and I've always been really excited about the potential that VR could offer. And I even tried Dactyl Nightmare at my local mall back then. But nothing was really consumer accessible back then. So all I could really do was read about it and try out some things with like Ren 386 in my C programming. But I'm really thrilled now that it's making a resurgence and that I have an opportunity to really dig into the technical core of how this thing works and maybe help to make it more effective.

[00:03:16.513] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think your diligence in terms of diving into the research papers or really figuring out what's happening behind the scenes and the way that you're able to kind of translate that. I mean, I had sort of looked at the time warping, but I didn't really dig into it. And it wasn't until I watched your video that I really grokked like what is actually going on and showing the before and afters between, you know, when it's turned on and off. I just thought it was like really well done in terms of explaining like these technical concepts. So. Yeah, I hope to see much more of that. And I'm curious, like what other big topics are out there that you haven't addressed that you want to maybe address in the future?

[00:03:56.597] Chiara Coetzee: That's a good question. I mean, a lot of the technical videos just kind of originated with me seeing something and getting interested in it and maybe noticing that people wanted to know more about it, but didn't really understand it very well. But I thought I could come up with at least one good way to explain it and maybe visualize it and show it in a way that's accessible to a lot of people. And it's really important for me personally to make VR accessible to the point where everybody can not only use it, but everyone can develop for it. It's a bit difficult for me to think of what topics I'm going to come up with in the future, but it'll really depend on what innovations come down the line that are really important. Right now, I'm just still thinking about it, and I'm very much open to suggestions from anybody in the community who thinks there could be something cool to talk about.

[00:04:45.450] Kent Bye: Awesome. So I'm curious about what led you to the point of going from hearing about the Oculus Rift to deciding to do a video every day since like December 19th and 133 videos later.

[00:04:59.518] Chiara Coetzee: So I mean for a long time, I think this is kind of the story that a lot of people in the community have had where they, you know, at first they're just curious about it, they hear from a friend about it, they hear a lot of really positive reviews, they hear that a lot of really important people are in on this thing. And they start reading about it. I was on the subreddit a long time before I started my channel, although not under my current account. And it just pretty much got to the point where I said, this VR is emerging, and I'm convinced now that VR is making its resurgence. I need to be part of making sure that that happens because there's a certain moral imperative in terms of everything that VR can give access to for everybody in society and improve humanity's life in general. That I think it's important to create a demand for it. It's important to help people understand it and become contributors to it. And that's kind of what my goal was when I started it all up.

[00:05:52.548] Kent Bye: Interesting. I'm really curious about your target audience for these playthrough videos and what you've found, what type of people are watching them, whether or not they are people who don't have a Rift or they do have a Rift and they sort of enjoy the commentary, or what's been your target demographic so far with these videos that you've been doing?

[00:06:11.871] Chiara Coetzee: So actually, my idea was to kind of try and pull in a few different demographics and kind of cross expose them to different things. So first of all, I wanted to pull in, on one hand, the people who were already in the community and were excited about, for example, indie demos that Showed really compelling concepts. I wanted to show them what they look like if they weren't able to play them on their machine or they didn't have a rift, show them, give them impressions, tell them how they can contribute to like Kickstarters and things like that. And on the other hand, I also wanted to draw in people who Like Half-Life 2 is a great example of this. People who were established gamers, they were really passionate about gaming, but they'd never heard of the Oculus Rift, or they had only just heard of it, and they wanted to see, like, can I play my favorite game X on the Rift, and what does that look like? And there were definitely some people on the Half-Life 2 series who were very, they were regulars, and they commented regularly. And I'm hoping that that helped pull them in and kind of expose them to the other videos that I'm regularly putting on my channel, which are more indie developers who are really, really struggling to establish their brand and to break into the VR space.

[00:07:17.674] Kent Bye: Yeah, and it does seem like you've done a lot of different demos and experiences within the virtual reality. I'm really curious about what has really stuck out with what you've experienced in VR so far.

[00:07:29.341] Chiara Coetzee: That's a good question. I mean, everything has its pros and cons. There's certainly a lot of very cool gaming experiences that are very complete and polished. Half-Life 2 was practically made for VR, even though they didn't make it for VR. On the other hand, a lot of the things that I found most interesting were the non-gaming applications. Like, one of the very first ones I ever showed was the Oculus Google Street View application that enables you to just go anywhere on Earth that Street View has data and look all around you. And I think that's the kind of application that just immediately shows how far this can go beyond gaming. And that definitely attracted a lot of attention from a wider audience. Like, I see people commenting on that video who definitely have no history in gaming based on their other interests on YouTube. And one that's always stuck out for me is Red Frame. So the Red Frame demo, just because it was one of the first dedicated VR demos that really worked hard on getting the lighting to look right, on getting everything to look realistic, to have a realistic feeling. And when you combine a realistic style like that with the Rift, you can get, I would say, as close to presence as you can get on the DK1. And ever since I found out about Red Frame, I've used it as, like, if I have to show anybody only one demo because of time, it's always the Red Frame demo. And I could go on all day about this, but that's kind of a brief summary.

[00:08:51.111] Kent Bye: Nice. I know I just recently watched your Techno Lust video and, you know, I turned to some of these playthrough videos just because I want to see it, but I also want to see the reaction more than that, to also see how other people are kind of reacting to what works and what doesn't work and hear that commentary. And I think that is a vital element of like as a community figuring out, OK, this is really good. This is really bad to use. I'm just curious about what are the things that you've seen that VR experiences should avoid and what should they try to emphasize? you

[00:09:22.575] Chiara Coetzee: In terms of what makes a good or a bad VR experience, there's a lot of things that are already really effectively encoded in, say, the Oculus Best Practices. Things like, I've played a lot of games with 4PEX on my channel, like, say, Dishonored, where the experience in certain places is really, really bad. Like, reflections being totally different in each eye, having that fill your vision. Where you go through a cutscene and they add cinematic bars to the top and bottom in black and force your viewpoint around during the cutscene to look at different characters. And of course, having menus and subscreens where you have important information in the corner and you can't see it because the whole thing is glued to your face. So those are definitely just a few examples of really bad experiences that traditional games just didn't do well for VR. But I think that for the most part, the indie developers are learning very quickly to avoid those kind of problems. and to build experiences that work well for VR. So conversely, some of the things that work really well. I'm really fond of the games where there's absolutely no HUD elements. This is one of the love-hate things I struggle with with Minecraft. Because in Minecraft, there's the HUD that tells you what items you have selected, and that's always getting in the way, and there's really no good way to configure it. that will make it feel good. So, I mean, they have a button to turn it off at any time. It's actually really fun, I think, to go through Minecraft with the HUD turned off. And likewise, the Half-Life 2 VR mod, like, the Valve version of Half-Life 2 has a HUD with your health and ammo, and it's virtually illegible, and it's actually kind of annoying. Whereas the Half-Life 2 VR mod has this very cool thing where you can use the Razer Hydra to hold up your hand in front of your face, and on your weapon it actually shows your ammo, and on the back of your hand you can see your health and shield. And I'm just really looking forward to a lot more games having all of their content embedded in the virtual world like that. And a lot of the recent demos like Technolust have already really taken that to heart. And other things that they do well, pretty much any demo that incorporates binaural sound works really well with VR. That doesn't sound like it directly relates to the riff, but it's such an important thing just to have that experience where you can hear something in your environment, and you know exactly where that thing is, and you can look over at it, and you can hear the sound shifting its position as you look over at it. and that just makes it so much more immersive. Another thing I really like is, and this is another thing Technolust did well, is just the experience of being smoothly transported or teleported from one environment to the other in a way that feels good, like when you jack into that VR arcade machine in that game. and suddenly being in another place. And I think that experience of kind of almost like just closing your eyes and opening them and you're in a new place can be a really cool experience that you can't really have in real life. Yeah, that's a brief summary. I can, there are other things, but that's a brief idea.

[00:12:11.270] Kent Bye: Okay, great. So I'm curious about your participation in different communities in the virtual reality space. And let's start with Reddit and just talk about the Oculus subreddit and your participation there.

[00:12:24.752] Chiara Coetzee: I mean, the Oculus subreddit's definitely been, personally for me, the most effective community that I've been a part of. Because, first of all, if you want to know the latest news, they knew about it yesterday. They're very, very on top of it. Like, if you want to be the first one to post a story, good luck with that. You better be hitting your refresh key. They're very much on top of the news. And in addition to that, there's a lot of really, really smart and dedicated people who know a lot about this space. Doc Ock is a good example of that. And a lot of developers in this space, people like even the mod Wormslayer is a developer in the space. And that gives them so much credibility as a community. And kind of what I see as my role, in addition to just kind of learning all the stuff by reading the threads and kind of getting different points of view on the issues, There's always new community members coming in asking questions that pretty much everybody knows the answer to, but I still try and kind of help them out and keep them informed and answer their questions. If there's kind of a tough technical issue that's come up that people aren't sure about, I try and figure out kind of what might be a feasible approach or solution or kind of what the next challenges are in it. And, you know, sometimes I have to pick my battles to some extent. Like, there's only so many things that I can really dive into and research in detail. And I often just kind of give hints or speculation in the place of more detailed investigation or trying things out or simulating things. But I definitely think it's a great community just for exploring the technical side of the Rift, keeping on top of all the latest things that are happening, being aware of Kickstarter campaigns that are important for the Rift, just all kinds of things like that.

[00:14:02.134] Kent Bye: Yeah, I definitely check into it at least once or twice a day. And sometimes when there's no news that I'm interested in really digging into, sometimes I'll actually go and read your comments that you have left, because you seem to comment on almost every single thread.

[00:14:17.403] Chiara Coetzee: Is there at least one?

[00:14:18.283] Kent Bye: That's a minor exaggeration. Well, you seem to show up a lot of the threads that I end up choosing, I guess I'd say. So yeah, I'd recommend people just check out your user slash every day on Reddit, just to kind of read through some of the comments. Because you make a lot of really smart and intelligent comments that you can kind of tell that you've been both researching and really checking stuff out. So it's definitely appreciated.

[00:14:43.346] Chiara Coetzee: That said, I have made a lot of comments where I was blatantly, completely wrong. And I just had to edit it and go, the above was wrong.

[00:14:52.101] Kent Bye: Cool, and I'm curious about some of the other communities that you've been participating in. I heard you mention that you've gone to different talk shows and VR chats and Cymatic Bruce's live stream. And maybe you could just give me a feel of the landscape of some of the stuff that you've been checking out in the social space.

[00:15:07.783] Chiara Coetzee: So, to some extent there's a, I mean obviously there's a lot of overlap between these communities. Some anchors show a lot of the people who attend it are generally a subset of the people from the subreddit, so I recognize a lot of them. And they're often the same people who come to it over and over again, but they're very engaged and a lot of them are very tech savvy, so they're a good group. And I've been to the VR chats, as you mentioned. I usually don't attend the whole things because they usually last for like four or five hours. But it's very cool to have people you recognize all kind of standing in a circle and having a conversation. And I guess another community, I sometimes participate on the developer forums. As well, and I think that's a place that people often forget about, but it's often the first place that, for example, new demos hit. It's a place where certain conversations are raised that don't show up on the subreddit, so it's definitely a good place to check. It's very relevant. And it's a kind of a different community in some sense. It's obviously a lot less enthusiasts and more developers, not to say there aren't also enthusiasts on the developer forum. And the other community I keep track of is pretty much just the people who comment on my videos. They ask me questions, I try and make sure I respond to all of them. I try and make sure that even if they're just giving me tips of the game, I try and incorporate those and make sure that people know I'm listening to them because that's important to me.

[00:16:26.788] Kent Bye: Right. And I'm curious what your experience in the VR chat or in the spaces where you're going in and creating some sort of virtual identity and communicating with people and what your experiences of that have been so far with the Rift.

[00:16:42.422] Chiara Coetzee: So first of all, VR social spaces are probably the application I'm most excited about. And so this is definitely something that I really enjoy doing. The ability to create and explore identity in addition to just the ability to, a lot of the body language and a lot of the interactions that are familiar from real life, even with the very primitive systems we have, can be reproduced to a certain extent. Like the fact that people naturally form those circles and the binaural audio helps a lot. And we already have head gestures based on the orientation of your head and things like that. And I mean, there are still a lot of limitations with that platform. I think there are going to be emerging modes for how people express themselves and how they shift their identity during an interaction. And I think people will develop social standards for these kind of things. And I definitely think when hand tracking enters the game and we have some kind of standard device that it's going to make a big difference in how people express themselves in those spaces. There's currently kind of a limited number of environments that people can place themselves in. I've been a little bit on servers like MetaCraft, which are very flexible, but your avatars are pretty much limited to things that look like they're made of blocks. Whereas in VRChat, something like VRChat, you have the much more realistic avatars, but on the other hand, the environment is usually fixed or limited to a small set of environments. So I'm hoping that we'll see in the future more VR social spaces that also have kind of a collaborative authoring element that's richer than what Minecraft can do. and also can kind of become part of the conversation where you're kind of creating artifacts together.

[00:18:12.193] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's like almost virtual culture, you know, people creating some sort of items, objects that reflect identity within the social space that, you know, definitely is creating a sense of ambiance and a feel. It's really interesting. I hadn't thought about that as being a critical component of that. I'm curious about free culture and where you see kind of the mix of bringing in elements of open source or creative commons or elements that are within the 2D space and translating that within the virtual space and where you see that kind of going.

[00:18:49.362] Chiara Coetzee: So I haven't actually talked about it very much in the community. I do have a lot of history with free culture. I've been, for example, an administrator on Wikipedia for the last 10 to 12 years or so, since 2004. I've been a big proponent of open access in my research community. And I've created a lot of free content myself. I think it's going to be very important in the VR space. Not just to have free software alternatives or open source software alternatives for kind of the VR stack, but also to have a source of freely licensed Creative Commons VR content that people can use in their VR spaces, that they can use in their applications, as well as that they can use in their VR social interactions. I think those are going to be really important because this is one of the issues with kind of traditional VR social spaces like Second Life is they've really locked down their assets to being used in a particular context. And I think it's going to be important to have assets that can freely move through a network of applications without legal constraints. And a lot of it with the rise. So there's currently kind of a trend towards, there have recently been developed 3D scanning machines to kind of go along with 3D printing machines. Those are just emerging now. But I think in the future, we're going to have to deal with, for example, people taking objects that they've purchased in real life and scanning them into VR. And then there are questions of rights around those. And I wonder, are we going to see like an underground and garden gnome sculptures in VR that people scan from their local market? I don't know. But there's going to be a lot of unanticipated questions around legal rights when you get into this mixing of real life and VR Yeah, I know I come from the open source community I've done about eight years in the Drupal world and

[00:20:34.897] Kent Bye: you know, having open source licenses is something that I think is a critical component to being able to share the wealth, so to speak. But the thing that I've noticed in the gaming community is that there doesn't seem to be as friendly to a lot of the open source licensing. I don't see a lot of open source content or even code that's out there. And I'm not sure if it's part of the culture or why that is.

[00:20:59.087] Chiara Coetzee: So, I mean, the weird thing is that It's not a thing that they're aggressive toward, it's more a thing that they don't think about really. It's a thing, when developers, for example, put their code on the developer forum, they're usually not thinking, oh, I don't want anybody stealing my code. They're usually, that's not why they don't put it under a free license. They're just thinking, I don't know anything about free licenses, so I'm just not going to say anything about that. And I think a lot of it is just going to come down to education and smart defaults, making it so that when people are contributing their code to common source code bases that are going to be used in VR, that we're putting gateways in that say, OK, we're releasing all this code under this free license. Do you understand what this means? Things like that. And I mean, that's one reason I think Wikipedia has been so successful is that they have this very simple gateway where every single edit, they have this little statement that you're agreeing to. And that's how they're able to put everything under a common license. And I think those defaults and that greater understanding about licenses is going to push more games content and source code into the open source space.

[00:22:03.174] Kent Bye: Yeah, I totally agree. And I'm curious, where do you see VR going in the next couple of years, and what you get the most excited about?

[00:22:13.691] Chiara Coetzee: In the next couple of years, so the Rift is going to come out in the next couple of years. I'm pretty sure about it. I mean, that's going to be huge in terms of public awareness, because that's going to have a giant marketing campaign behind it. never heard of or cared about VR are going to be hearing about this, and they're going to see their friends and family having units. Because I anticipate it's going to have really big sales. And so that's going to be a big cultural shift in itself, just the Rift having that penetration in that market. And beyond that, I anticipate Most likely technological advances, particularly in the areas of hand input. I think that's going to be really important for a lot of interactions. I mean, already there's been people prototyping with the Razer Hydro who have done great things, and I think that that's just going to become more and more important as we go on. I think there's most likely going to be more attention to getting good binaural audio that really sounds right in VR and increases immersion. And beyond that, like a lot of it just is unknowable. I think that we're going to get to the point where, so there was kind of this thing with the Kinect, where as soon as it became a popular consumer item, there were hordes of human-computer interaction researchers, of researchers in all other fields who were saying, well, we have this cheap device that can do this cool input that we couldn't do before. Now what can we do with that? And I think we're going to see the exact same thing with the Rift. It's going to be sold at or near cost. It's going to be very widely available. It's going to be very high quality. And researchers are going to ask then, what can we do with this? What can we do with 20 of them? And they'll be grabbing these units and doing innovative new things with them. And I think it's really going to start dominating the HCI conferences in the future.

[00:23:57.585] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think VR input is probably the biggest open question in terms of what's going to come out there. And I'm a part of the Connect V2 program. And just today, they actually announced that they are going to have Unity support and plugin that they just released.

[00:24:13.601] Chiara Coetzee: And the thing is about... It's very cool.

[00:24:15.938] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm excited, except for the one thing about the hand gesture is that they are really concerned with the connect of, it's really designed and built to like tracking up to six people. And so, you know, in terms of processing, they're like tracking facial expressions and, you know, they don't have the bandwidth to be able to go to the fidelity of doing finger tracking.

[00:24:36.245] Chiara Coetzee: And so it's really just the thumb and the forefinger. I mean, that's what leap motion is made for, but even leap motion has issues with occlusion and tracking volume and all that kind of thing.

[00:24:45.915] Kent Bye: Yeah, and one of the things they mentioned was Matrilius is a company out of Germany and they said, you know, the sensor is able to do all that, but, you know, their use case is making games where you're tracking the full skeletal and with like six people. So, but Matrilius is going to have like a finger tracking solution apparently, but I don't know if it's going to be like a Unity plugin or anything, but. I would imagine, I would hope that something that's on Oculus' radar, I would be surprised if it isn't.

[00:25:13.554] Chiara Coetzee: Yeah, I've actually talked to a researcher just yesterday who is working at Berkeley on hand and finger tracking for a robotics problem, and they talked to me. I gave a big demo to the HCI lab yesterday, and that was one of the people who talked to me afterwards. I think there are a lot of people working on the hand problem right now. And I'm personally convinced that reliable hand tracking is going to come out of a wearable device rather than something that tracks bare hands in space at this juncture. But I don't know exactly what it's going to look like.

[00:25:45.957] Kent Bye: Interesting. So too much latency in that it's not precise enough and all that stuff?

[00:25:50.239] Chiara Coetzee: I'll see the occlusion problem, really. I don't think there's any way to deal with the occlusion problem.

[00:25:56.392] Kent Bye: I see. So if your finger is hiding what the other fingers are doing on the inside, then unless you have three sensors or something.

[00:26:04.616] Chiara Coetzee: Right. I mean, if you plaster the room with sensors, then yeah, you could do solid, accurate tracking. But it's pretty challenging to get tracking of all fingers when the fingers are occluding each other. And in addition to that, I think the latency problems, I think those can all be driven down. I think those can be reduced. But there are other problems that just aren't going to go away. I think people will wear data gloves if there is a data glove that will have, like, for example, STEM is really improving their magnetic tracking, and it's completely free of any kind of occlusion problem. And I think once you start combining sensors where you're wearing something that can track individual fingers as well as track absolute position in a way that's occlusion-free, I think you can then start to get something that's really accurate and solid.

[00:26:50.074] Kent Bye: Hmm. Oh, that's really interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think it's sort of an interesting thing, too, of like, you know, watching some of the Riftmax theater, some people have the Hydra controllers and, you know, the people that don't are just kind of sitting there. So there's this kind of sense of like, if you don't have the proper VR input, you're kind of created this... Right. lower class in some ways.

[00:27:12.828] Chiara Coetzee: And that's a good point, actually. And that's, I think, what's going to drive sales of a lot of these things. People are like, who's going to pay $300 for VR hand input? Well, the answer is you show up in your favorite VR social space, and you're the only one who can't wave hi to your friends. You're going to pay $300. Yeah.

[00:27:27.536] Kent Bye: So yeah, there's a lot of interesting questions that I think will come out of that as well in terms of how much gear do you have to be able to really participate in the virtual spaces. One of the things I'm really excited about is the education component. And that's actually kind of what got me into VR above and beyond the games is when I saw somatic Bruce's like top games of the 2013 and number four was the Titans of Space, which wasn't a typical game at all. So I'm curious about what your take is on the education field.

[00:28:01.880] Chiara Coetzee: So first of all, I don't know. I didn't actually go over my whole background, but my current dissertation research is in the area of online education. And I've definitely been doing a lot of study in that area. And I think that VR is going to be really critical for it. On the other hand, I wouldn't want to overestimate its role. I don't think it's realistic to think that we're going to see a ready player one scenario where we are replicating physical classrooms in VR and like teleporting people on field trips and things like, like virtual field trips have advantages, Titans of Space is able to have visualizations that are really educational. But I think we should avoid the temptation to say we're just going to put all education in VR and it'll be so much better. I think that what we're actually going to see is more of a push toward just remote education. And putting the elements of remote education that require some kind of physical aspect or some kind of visualization or interaction with something, with your hands for example, those are the kind of elements that are just necessarily going to need to go into VR. Whereas some other elements, for example, like understanding how to differentiate a polynomial, that's kind of a sequence of rules. And if you have a web page that tells you how to do it, you can learn how to do it. So I think it's important to kind of think about the special benefits it can bring to education and what their advantages are over kind of 2D methods or real life interaction in small groups and things like that. Yeah, just trying to kind of focus on the places where it's strongest and rather than trying to push every aspect into it. There's one application that came up in a Reddit thread that I thought was really interesting. It's the idea of doing kind of foreign language immersion learning in a VR context by having a virtual world where objects are automatically labeled with their names and the target language being learned where you can have conversations with NPCs. and have them respond based on your choice of responses and have like subtitles and captions on things. And I think there's that kind of augmented reality in virtual reality, if that makes sense, where you're kind of in an environment that's realistic, but not terribly interesting, but you're adding augmented or descriptive elements on top of it to try and teach you more about it. I think those are going to be really important. They can be used for all kinds of training and education and development. So that's a few examples.

[00:30:20.705] Kent Bye: Interesting. Yeah, so really getting into the voice input as well and speech recognition I think would be a huge component when you get that nut cracked. But what do you think would be kind of the ideal topic that would be so much better to teach in virtual reality versus doing it in 2D space or not having that immersive component?

[00:30:41.963] Chiara Coetzee: So I think it's less about the topic and it's actually more about kind of the method. It's kind of, so an equivalent question would be something like, what's an example of a topic that's better to teach with video than with a web page and text? And I think the answer is that, well, there are aspects of every topic that are easier to convey with videos that have visualizations and animations. And there are aspects that are easier to convey just by explaining them in words. And I think that's going to be true for VR as well. I think you're going to have aspects of topics that you really just want to sit them down and explain them in words and have a normal webpage. And there's going to be other aspects of topics where you really need that ability to compare sizes, where you need That ability to get the atmosphere of a place. For example, trying to imagine what it's like to be in an Italian castle at the height of the Renaissance. You're not going to get that feeling and that atmosphere that you would standing there in VR just by somebody describing it. And the other things are just learning about things that require body language interaction between people. And foreign language is a great example of that because it's fundamentally a communication mechanism between people. And for that, you really want to learn both the language aspects as well as the body language aspects at the same time. And those are best to express in a VR setting.

[00:31:59.832] Kent Bye: Here in Portland, Oregon, they have a quantified self meetup that I've gone to a few times, and there's a guy there named Steve Jonas who, for the past five or six years, has been using space repetition, like SuperMemo or Anki. The idea being that it's a set of digital flashcards where the point at which you need to remind yourself of it is the point you're about to forget it, and so you tell it how well you know it, and then it figures out at what point you need to remind yourself of that. So I do think that there's a sense of repetition that is required for learning, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts in terms of like space repetition or other techniques that would be applicable to virtual reality.

[00:32:38.444] Chiara Coetzee: Right. So there have been studies regarding kind of spacing between review and what are good schedules with which to do that. And it has certain application to VR. And I think some people will already be kind of intuitively familiar with this from the game design space because with game design there is a certain amount of scheduled learning because you have to introduce skills and then you have to get people to use those skills often enough that they keep them while they're playing the game. And you definitely see this in any professionally developed title. I think that the gaming community has an intuitive sense. It's definitely going to come into educational applications as well, where you'll want to have a world that's designed in such a way that people have encounters with concepts with the right kind of scheduling and spacing constraints as they move through the world in a very natural way that doesn't feel like you're sitting them down to say, okay, now it's review time.

[00:33:30.065] Kent Bye: Interesting. So I'm really curious about what you plan on building in VR, if you're going to build anything, or if there's any pet projects, or where you're going to go in the future in this space.

[00:33:42.350] Chiara Coetzee: So first of all, I definitely would like to get more directly involved in a professional capacity following my graduation, which is probably sometime in the next couple of years, maybe around the Rift release time. For the moment, it's more kind of in my free time. And in terms of projects I'm interested in, I kind of, I always have a list of ideas on the back burner. I had some ideas about like, for example, visualizing file system hierarchies by having a space that's dynamically generated. I thought that might be interesting. I was interested in looking at some of the stuff on the core engine side, like, for example, ways to increase performance to handle the trade-off between field of view and frames per second better by rendering at multiple resolutions and compositing them. And I've also talked a little bit with Team Metatron, who you might be familiar with. They're a subgroup of enthusiasts in the community who are working on the VR chest application. For them, I'm interested in doing maybe some of their core technical work, maybe consulting with their process based on my industry experience, some things like that. So I definitely want to have a more active role as a developer going forward and try and use more of my development experience to kind of help VR. But I don't know exactly where that's going to go yet.

[00:34:56.709] Kent Bye: Great. And maybe just to kind of wrap this up, maybe you could just point people to how they can find you online and the best way to get in touch with you.

[00:35:05.693] Chiara Coetzee: Sure. So if you want to know more about me, I am EverydayVR. So that's E-V-R-Y-D-A-Y-V-R on YouTube. I am the same thing on Twitter. And that's also my page on Facebook. And you can email me if you want to at EverydayVR at gmail.com. And yeah, if you want to know more, just contact me.

[00:35:28.934] Kent Bye: Great. Well, thanks, Dee, so much for joining me today. And yeah, I guess I will continue to see you in the VR space. Yeah, thanks a lot.

More from this show

Menu

#1: eVRydayVR on Virtual Reality evangelism, communities & education