In Part 8 of my Dispelling Myths, Navigating Ethical Labyrinths, and Applying Design Principles in the Metaverse series, I explored the first of the mysterious ethical labyrinths of instructional design for immersive environments, that is the most common problems that arise from research interpretation. The first commonly noted problem was the novelty effect– the immersive environment was a one-off or very new experience. Newer experiences cause higher performance scores with learners. The novelty effect, however, can wear off. Few studies push past the novelty. The second problem is that media comparison studies often pit very different instructional approaches against each other, creating a massively unfair cognitive comparison; in short, they compare different cognitive workloads. Unsurprisingly, the immersive environment is often set up to comparatively win. The third common problem is missing design theories and models. The fourth common problem was problematic data in terms of assessment, collection, and sample size.
Here in Part 9, I will explore a second ethical maze addressed in this series are challenges with creation processes, specifically with immersive experience content and the subsequent publishing of results.
Content creation
Because immersive experiences environments are entirely digitally created, behind the scenes are the content creators. Research has noted that immersive experiences and social media share the same landscape of influencing. Immersive experiences can influence through emotions by misleading, inducing, manipulating, personalizing, and distorting reality (Mhaidli & Schaub, 2021). Simultaneously, the immersive environment is suspected to possibly both foster positive feelings (Li et al., 2024) and to overwhelm the learner’s senses (Makransky & Petersen, 2021), both elements which might lower the learner’s resistance to influence.
Thus, the same technology touted with the potential to deeply impact learners can be used in campaigns to influence or prejudice learners. Procopiou (2021) proposed that the stimulating environment of immersive experiences could make learners “more vulnerable to the extremists’ and terrorists’ recruitment approaches, propaganda and radicalisation methods” (p. 31). Undoubtedly, the researchers in the Stanford VR class described having a “jarring experience” when realizing that their learners had depicted the Moon landing as fake (J. Brown et al., 2023, p. 1). Noting this concern, these authors further argued that the high development burden of making misleading immersive experiences should prevent them from being made under anything but the most purposeful of circumstances. Said another way, they felt that only bad actors would put forth the effort to make something elaborate and false. However, the declining cost of immersive experience development and immersive experience’s primary use as social (meetings, events) hints that it does not require flawless builds to influence. This suggests that the perceived development obstacle will not remain for long.
The Virtual Museum of Palmyra
On the other hand, there are examples of immersive experiences being used to counter real world narratives perpetrated by bad actors. In 2015 and 2017, violent extremists destroyed parts of the ancient city of Palmyra (Barnard & Saad, 2015; Unitar, 2017.) Virtual reconstructions began immediately (Denker, 2016). There has been some comment that the digitization by European and American institutions constituted a form of colonization of Syrian heritage (Samad, 2020).
In some cases, immersive experiences technology fails to be representative of its intended users. When Morehouse University adopted immersive experiences, there were concerns that black learners and faculty avatars were poor representations. D’Agostino (2022) quoted Muhsinah Morris, a chemistry professor at the institution, who pinpointed the problem, “Representation matters because of the memories that you create…You are still a person behind that avatar” (para. 33). Millron (2023) referred to these problems as “inelegant and downright crude attempts at representation” (para. 4).
Technological companies have been under scrutiny for a retinue of privacy invasion problems. But there are also concerns that these companies’ main purpose is profit, not education and what that could lead to. Nir Eisikovits, philosophy professor and founding director of the Applied Ethics Center at the University of Massachusetts at Boston contented that there is a future possible overlap of privacy invasion and immersive experiences’ learner data, when he stated, “If you can monetize how much time I spend on a YouTube video or if you can monetize your Google search, imagine how you could monetize your biometric responses to stimuli that you viewed in virtual reality” D’Agostino (2022, para. 24).
The dominance of a few players in the shrinking immersive experiences technology market is also cause for concern. Developers have had to work within constraints to get published on the the Meta Quest 2 VR headset (Lang, 2024; Armstrong, 2023). Platforms and companies like Microsoft’s AltspaceVR and Magic Leap that did seem poised to continue in the immersive experiences market have abandoned their efforts. When major companies dominate the content creation market, they can choke out smaller, independent, and open-source options. Issues with lack of competition and fair choice are detrimental to the success of immersive experiences in education.
Denker, A. (2016, October). Virtual Palmyra: 3d reconstruction of the lost reality of “the bride of the desert”. In 8th International Congress on Archaeology, Computer Graphics, Cultural Heritage and Innovation, 318–320. https://doi.org/10.4995/arqueologica8.2015.3540
Li, L., Hu, Y., Yang, X., Wu, M., Tao, P., Chen, M., & Yang, C. (2024). Enhancing pre-service teachers’ classroom management competency in a large class context: the role of fully immersive virtual reality. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03538-9
Makransky, G., & Petersen, G. B. (2021). The Cognitive Affective Model of Immersive Learning (CAMIL): a Theoretical Research-Based Model of Learning in Immersive Virtual Reality. Educational Psychology Review 33(3), 937–958. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-020-09586-2
Mhaidli, A. H., & Schaub, F. (2021). Identifying manipulative advertising techniques in XR through scenario construction. Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445253
Procopiou, A. (2022, December). Ready player bad: the future rise of extremism and terrorism in the Metaverse. In 2022 IEEE 2nd International Conference on Intelligent Reality (ICIR) (pp. 31-34). IEEE.
Samad, B. A. (2020). Civilizational memory: the transformation of Palmyra as a cultural patrimony of the west. Bowlin Green State University.
Ethics, as a set of rules of practice, is something thatinstructional designers deal with on a daily basis in the form of assuring learner privacy, coursework security, instructor authorship and institutional ownership (Moore, 2021). These topics are recognizable within instructional designers’ professional work lives. However, many instructional design models like ADDIE, Backwards Design, and ASSURE do not include any acknowledgment of possible ethical concerns (Warren et al., 2023). As such, instructional designers might not recognize some ethical decisions which are a critical part of their professional job (Moore, 2021). Within immersive environments, the stakes are higher as learners are primed to experience environments far beyond a classroom or home.
A scoping review of relevant research topics for immersive environments that covered access, content production, and deployment does not mention ethics (Gaspar et al., 2018). However, research on ethics in immersive educational environments is beginning to appear (Moore, 2021; Glaser & Moore, 2023; Zallio & Clarkson, 2022). Zallio, Huang, Osaki, Hong, Chang, Liu, and Ohashi (2024) completed a review of ethical issues in VR and AR technologies and found 15 different and broad ethical concerns including the dichotomy between the virtual and the real world (for example, abuse in immersive experiences), concerns related to user safety (for example, sensory overload) and the ethical concerns of people who surround immersive headset users (for example, caregivers). This series will look at some areas where instructional designers can exert influence even after the decision to incorporate immersive experiences has been made.
Interpreting research
Relying on what the research portrays on the surface does not fully illuminate what is happening within the immersive experiences. Research results were at the core of the myths illuminated earlier in this series. What might be a kernel of truth could be turned into a claim that immersive experiences will revolutionize education.
Instructional designers can conduct literature reviews and quickly review research paper abstracts for studies that are similar to the situation being considered. R. C. Clark and Mayer (2016) summarized how to examine research claims for e-learning, but these questions equally apply to sorting for immersive experience research.
“Are the methods, content, learners, and context like yours?
Does the experimental group outscore the control at a significance
level of p < .05?
Does the effect size favor the experimental group at a 0.5 level or
higher? (p. 63)
Despite experimental results that tout learning success in immersive experiences, those results might not apply to another situation due to different variables, effect size, and other appropriate measures. Readers of research need to become adept at identifying effect sizes, immersion times, and the presence of comparison groups. In summary, “as a consumer of experimental research, you need to be picky” (R. C. Clark & Mayer, 2016, p. 56)
Disgust embodies ‘you need to be picky’
When reviewing research, the reader may sleuth for two primary problems that might appear in immersive experience studies: the presence of novelty effect and the bane of media comparisons.
Novelty effect
This series defines novelty effect as the phenomena when learners are exposed to something new during instruction and the new treatment causes increased motivation, excitement, and effort. There is usually a corresponding learning gain from the increased attention (Lodico et al., 2010). R. E. Clark and Craig (1992) succinctly refer to the novelty effect as the “attitude advantage” (p. 9). Novelty effect can be suspected within a research design when the learners are exposed to a media with which they are not familiar and the learners’ time within the experience is limited. The presence of the novelty effect is generally a negative threat to external validity of a study; the study results cannot necessarily be generalized to be true for other populations.
Certainly, an educator might be buoyed up by the illusory increase from incorporating immersive experiences. Just as motivation increases, however, it can also decrease. When the newness of the technology wears off, the learning gains tend to equilibrate to be comparable with other media choices (Clark & Craig, 1992).
It is valid to ponder how long the novelty effect can be expected to last with immersive experience. The answer is it depends. Novelty effect is unique to each learner. Some learners might personally use immersive headsets outside of learning environments and the novelty of the experience will end sooner for them. At the time of this series’s writing, headsets and immersive learning environments are not ubiquitous, so the novelty effect can be expected for some time into the future.
Media comparison studies
Much research about immersive experiences for learning has focused on the hardware and the learners’ reaction to it in the form of comparison studies (Glaser & Moore, 2023; Stefan et al., 2023). Studies often measure learning gains and do not give balanced consideration of the constraints of time, money, space, and connectivity that might have been present (McGivney, 2023). Indeed, media comparison studies are a debatable topic in instructional design. We must look at the root of the problem
With the arrival of personal computers into education in the early 1980s, a debate arose of what causes the ideal conditions of learning: the media (which at this time was the personal computer) or the method (which is the approach taken to conduct the learning). R. E. Clark’s initial salvo in 1983, drawing on what was then already decades of empirical research, asserted that,
There are no learning benefits to be gained from employing any specific medium to deliver instruction. Research showing performance or time-saving gains from one or another medium are shown to be vulnerable to compelling rival hypotheses concerning the uncontrolled effects of instructional method and novelty. (p. 445)
With this, R. E. Clark called the media emperor naked. He pointed at two possible causes of learning gains seen in media comparison studies: the novelty effect (which was covered in the last section) and uncontrolled instructional methods. This latter item is when two different media experiences are pitted against each other to determine which is better. The problem is that use of different media often requires correspondingly different instructional methods. Thus, if something is taught differently, any differences cannot be the result of the media’s impact alone. The learning accomplished between the two media can be very different.
An example of a poor media comparison would be when learners in an immersive experience are compared to learners in paper and pencil-based learning. The results of a comparison like this should be discounted due to the varying cognitive impact that the different instructional methods have on the learner (Parong & Mayer, 2021). In another example, a control group was exposed to the standard training and an experimental group was exposed to VR training in addition to and after the standard training (Seymour, et al., 2002). The VR group scored higher. The extra training time with the content could have caused higher scores, not the media. The two media conditions of one with and one without immersive experiences were not comparable.
Honebein and Reigeluth (2020) refer to media comparison studies as “a good guys versus bad guys competition” (p. 6). The comparison scenario has been repeated between many media. But R. E. Clark doubled down on this claim against media comparison studies in 1994 by making the “replaceability challenge” wherein he asked “whether there are other media or another set of media attributes that would yield similar learning gains” (p. 21). The research record since 1994 has supported R. E. Clark’s stance, now referred to at times as the no significant difference phenomena with media.
Honebein and Reigeluth (2020) contended that the entire research-to-prove approach, striving to prove which media is better, needs to be replaced with a research-to-improve approach acknowledging the complexity and systemic components for each individual situation. Instructional designers can draw from this research-to-improve idea by advocating for the specific affordances that immersive experiences media might bring that stand separate from learning gains. More discussion of those affordances will be mentioned within the future directions section of this series.
You do plan to have some learning theory in your learning experience, right?
Missing design theories and models
The design work for immersive experiences in education is complex. To design for the highest possible chance of learning, there should be instructional models or beacons for developers and designers to follow. Immersive experiences, as replications of real world experiences, could reasonably utilize any major learning theory. Radianti et al. (2020) reported that in their review of immersive virtual reality applications, 68% of studies did not mention a learning theory. Most papers focused on XR usability and did not connect theory with use. Checa and Bustillo (2023) asserted that constructivism, behaviorism, cognitivism, and connectivism can be foundations for a wide variety of immersive pedagogical approaches. Similarly, Marougkas et al. (2023) found that constructivism was the most commonly cited learning theory in VR studies. However, the specific affordances of presence and embodiment in the metaverse point to simulations and experiential learning as the most appropriate design theories (Reigeluth & Carr-Chellman, 2009; Johnson-Glenberg, 2018; Checa & Bustillo, 2023; Marougkas et al., 2023).
Similarly, Castelhano et al. (2023) conducted a systematic literature review for instructional design models and found that no current model combines the best of what we know about pedagogy from two-dimensional learning with the affordances of three-dimensional technologies. For example, traditional pedagogical research has shown the importance of having clear learning objectives, a consideration of the audience, planned and structured learning, and alignment of assessment choices. All of these are standard instructional design expectations. By contrast, immersive experience research identifies the importance of segmenting training to avoid overload in intensely stimulating and surrounding environments. Also, the research stresses the equal importance of both advance briefings (on-boarding) to prepare learners for what they will experience and post-briefings (off-boarding) to allow the learners to process and engage in generative activities (Dede, 2021). Thus, researchers seem to be not putting the best of what are separate knowledge pools together.
Similar gaps in theory-driven designs were found by Kim et al. (2023) and McGowin, Fiore, and Oden (2023). The emergent use of immersive experiences technology has precipitated haphazard designs lacking guidance:
In these early days, trial and error plays an outsized role in design. Education researchers borrow heavily from the entertainment designers, who focus on engagement, and not necessarily on retention of content. The dearth of studies highlights the urgency for a set of guidelines for designing content that allows users to make appropriate choices in a spherical space. (Johnson-Glenberg, 2018, p. 7)
Indeed, “theoretical frameworks devised to inform design, research, and practice in the field are rare” (Southgate, 2020).
Problematic data
Even after the learning event is done, assessing the results has been problematic. In a systematic review of computer-aided technologies in safety training, Gao et al. (2019) found that evidence supporting the effectiveness of the training is poor. Narciso et al. (2021) observed that the most common form of assessment used in published research of immersive experiences for learning was questionnaires. This contradicts the advice recommended by experts who point out that assessments should be tied closely to future performance (Ziker, et al., 2020). According to Stefan et al. (2023), only one-third of published studies contained some form of evaluation at all. Of those, Kirkpatrick’s Level 1, learner reaction, measurements were found 66% of the time. Some research studies do not seem to go further than asking the learners if they liked the immersive experience (Kavanagh at al., 2017; Stefan, et al., 2023). While liking an experience is pleasant, it is known that what learners like or prefer to engage in for their learning often has no positive correlation to their actuallearning (Thalheimer, 2018; Ruiz-Martin et al., 2024).
Further problems appear once research is published. Lanier et al. (2019) noted that the median sample size in published studies was 25 participants. This number might not represent a large enough data pool to detect anything but large effects. If the impact effect of immersive experiences is supposed to be moderate, pools of 25 participants would only statistically detect the impact in about 50% of the experiments (Lanier et al., 2019, p. 14). This means that even if the inclusion of immersive experiences do positively impact learning, most published research studies cannot detect it because the sample sizes are too small. Despite researchers and educational influencers using the word significant to describe future anticipated impacts of immersive experiences, there is room for doubt that statistical thresholds are being met.
In the next part of these series, I’ll cover the ethical problems inside of the biased content creation process – both in terms of XR content and research publishing.
References
Castelhano, M., Morgado, L., & Pedrosa, D. (2023, November 1). Instructional design models for immersive virtual reality: a systematic literature review. http://hdl.handle.net/10400.2/15232
Checa, D., & Bustillo, A. (2023). Virtual reality for learning. Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences, 289–307. https://doi.org/10.1007/7854_2022_404
Clark, R. E. (1994). Media will never influence learning. Educational Technology Research and Development, 42(2), 21–29. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02299088
Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2016). E-Learning and the science of instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning. John Wiley & Sons.
Gao, Y., Gonzalez, V. A., & Yiu, T. W. (2019.). The effectiveness of traditional tools and computer-aided technologies for health and safety training in the construction sector: a Systematic review. Computers & Education, 138,101–115. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2019.05.003
Gaspar, H., Morgado, L., Mamede, H. S., Manjón, B., & Gütl, C. (2018). Identifying immersive environments’ most relevant research topics: an instrument to query researchers and practitioners. iLRN 2018 Montana. Workshop, Long and Short Paper, and Poster Proceedings From the Fourth Immersive Learning Research Network Conference, 48–71. https://doi.org/10.3217/978-3-85125-609-3-10
Glaser, N., & Moore, S. (2023). Redefining immersive technology research: Beyond media comparisons to holistic learning approaches. Digital Psychology, 4(1S), 4–8. https://doi.org/10.24989/dp.v4i1s.2272
Honebein, P.C. & Reigeluth, C.M. (2020). The instructional theory framework appears lost. Isn’t it time we find it again? RED Revista Educación a Distancia, 20(64). http://dx.doi.org/10.6018/red.405871
Johnson-Glenberg, M. C. (2018). Immersive VR and education: embodied design principles that include gesture and hand controls. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2018.00081
Kavanagh, S., Luxton-Reilly, A., Wuensche, B., & Plimmer, B. (2017). A systematic review of Virtual Reality in education. Themes in science and technology education, 10(2), 85-119. http://earthlab.uoi.gr/theste
Kim, T., Planey, J., & Lindgren, R. (2023). Theory-driven design in metaverse virtual reality learning environments: Two illustrative cases. IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, 16(6), 1141–1153. https://doi.org/10.1109/tlt.2023.3307211
Lanier, M., Waddell, T. F., Elson, M., Tamul, D. J., Ivory, J. D., & Przybylski, A. (2019). Virtual reality check: Statistical power, reported results, and the validity of research on the psychology of virtual reality and immersive environments. Computers in Human Behavior, 100, 70–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.06.015
Lodico, M. G., Spaulding, D. T., & Voegtle, K. H. (2010). Methods in educational research: From Theory to Practice. John Wiley & Sons.
Marougkas, A., Troussas, C., Krouska, A., & Sgouropoulou, C. (2023). Virtual reality in education: a review of learning theories, approaches and methodologies for the last decade. Electronics, 12(13), 2832. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics12132832
McGivney, E. (2023). Improving Technology- Enhanced Immersive Learning With Design-Based Implementation Research. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference of the Learning Sciences-ICLS 2023. https://doi.org/10.22318/icls2023.213038
McGowin, G., Fiore, S. M., & Oden, K. (2023). Towards a theory of learning in immersive virtual reality: designing learning affordances with embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended cognition. In Cherner, T. & Fegely, A. (Eds.), Bridging the XR technology-to-practice gap: methods and strategies for blending extended realities into classroom instruction, Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/222242/
Moore, S. (2021). The design models we have are not the design models we need. Journal of Applied Instructional Design, 10(4). https://doi.org/10.51869/104/smo
Narciso, D., Melo, M., Rodrigues, S., Paulo Cunha, J., Vasconcelos-Raposo, J., & Bessa, M. (2021). A systematic review on the use of immersive virtual reality to train professionals. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 80, 13195-13214. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-10454-y
Parong, J., & Mayer, R. E. (2018). Learning science in immersive virtual reality. Journal of Educational Psychology, 110(6), 785–797. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000241
Radianti, J., Majchrzak, T. A., Fromm, J., & Wohlgenannt, I. (2020). A systematic review of immersive virtual reality applications for higher education: Design elements, lessons learned, and research agenda. Computers & education, 147, 103778.
Reigeluth, C. M., & Carr-Chellman, A. A. (Eds.). (2009). Instructional-design theories and models, volume III: Building a common knowledge base. (Vol. 3). Routledge.
Ruiz-Martín, H., Blanco, F., & Ferrero, M. (2024). Which learning techniques supported by cognitive research do students use at secondary school? Prevalence and associations with students’ beliefs and achievement. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 9(1), 44.
Seymour, N. E., Gallagher, A. G., Roman, S. A., O’brien, M. K., Bansal, V. K., Andersen, D. K., & Satava, R. M. (2002). Virtual reality training improves operating room performance: results of a randomized, double-blinded study. Annals of surgery, 236(4), 458.
Southgate, E. (2020, June). Conceptualising embodiment through virtual reality for education. In 2020 6th international conference of the immersive learning research network (iLRN) (pp. 38-45). IEEE.
Stefan, H., Mortimer, M. & Horan, B. Evaluating the effectiveness of virtual reality for safety-relevant training: a systematic review. Virtual Reality27, 2839–2869 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-023-00843-7
Warren, S., Beck, D., & McGuffin, K. (2023). In support of ethical instructional design. S. Moore y L. Dousay (Eds.). Applied ethics for instructional design and technology, 15-37.
Zallio, M., & Clarkson, P. J. (2022). Designing the metaverse: A study on inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility and safety for digital immersive environments. Telematics and Informatics, 75, 101909.
Zallio, M., Huang, T., Osaki, Y., Hong, S., Chang, X., Liu, W., & Ohashi, T. (2024). The ethics of immersion: A scoping review of VR and AR technologies. Accessibility, Assistive Technology and Digital Environments, 121(121).
Ziker, C., Ydo, E., Zapata-Rivera, D., Hillier, M., & Casale, M. (2020, June). Special session—Challenges and opportunities for assessment in XR. In 2020 6th International Conference of the Immersive Learning Research Network (iLRN) (pp. 421-423). IEEE.
In the next part of these series, I’ll cover the ethical problems inside of the biased content creation process – both in terms of XR content and research publishing.
Did you miss the other parts of this series? Here they are!
As promised, I’m starting blog posts about my Hubs/Blender builds. This will be a bit like stepping into a running stream as I’m over 2 years into my learning journey. I’m not that far in, still working primarily in modeling and I’ve done a little animation and I’m currently learning Grease Pencil (2D). Plus, I hope that some of my writing will help others.
What I do in Hubs and with Blender, for now, is pure art.
And that’s a good starting point for this blog because My Tron build, The Grid, was a really fun art study in negative space. In other words, this build had me work on what was not there just as much as what was there.
Tron
I don’t remember how me and YouTube started cross-pollinating on Tron. Truly, I’m not that into the movie (you will not believe that by the time this post is done because now, my Tron lore cup runneth over). It might have been this video, Sweet Dreams are Made of These, Epic Tron Version. I just find this song mesmerizing.
At some point, probably when searching out YouTube Blender tutorials, I ran across this video, Make Tron City in Blender, Real Time Render.
I watched this, it’s only 39 minutes and the creator is true to his word (mostly) that the build can be made in a short period of time. (There is little sped up footage.) That means a lot when evaluating a Blender tutorial. Many creators speed up time and give building ‘the hand wave’ approach. However, a close watch will show that this creator, Daniel Grove, made the Tron city three times as there are two different showcased cities (the center building changes) and then the one he builds as his how-to in real time.
Nonetheless, it looked very simple. I was intrigued to play with bloom. Making my own textures with Blender was something I had just learned to do. I started.
Textures
This video and I think perhaps one by Grant Abbitt on using Grease Pencil Drawing in Blender got me going with using the Drawing tools in Blender and practicing something relatively easy, straight lines. I input a few circles but most of the textures are straight lines with a few angles.
In my “lit review” of Tron art, angles are a cool element. They are not quite 45 degrees, but they play near there.
Inspiration images – note some of these are directly from the Tron movies/books but some are fan art.
So I had my first bunch of textures, these were all made in Blender. Note that they are white on black.
None of these show up in the final build
I got the rest of the buildings made (and conceived of my “Halloween twist”), put the textures on and ramped up the bloom. The tutorial has you build a Color Ramp to turn the white to blue. In Blender, it looked fabulous! Essentially, I’m done! No, I’m not. I make immersive art.
I put the build up into Hubs to get inside it for the first time.
Nothing. Blackness. But that’s because my build was unlit– as in completely unlit; no light source. I had to play with some HDRIs to get the lighting I wanted.
And, I had bloom off on my own browser. That’s the problem that you can partially see below. It’s not glowing.
Work in progress. Note that the blue color is working but nothing is glowing.
So starts the work of translating what is a great scene in Blender to work in the WebXR platform, Hubs. There are LOT more settings to be worked on. In total, lighting took me ~3 days, slowing tweaking each setting and using the Hubs Blender Add-On after every tweak to see if was working towards the effect I wanted. Plus I had to turn bloom on.
Problem
But of course, Hubs cannot understand the color ramp taught in the tutorial. So now I had to rebuild my entire set of textures in blue on black. Plus by now I know I want a set of purple on black for Halloween. I didn’t quite keep a set of Blender files for each texture, so I had t remake most of them from scratch. Bummer. That was another two days work. Plus I had to check for just the right “blue” (HEX 0DC2FF) and “purple” (HEX 7809A4) inside of Hubs. I would reference those 2 HEX codes frequently. In hindsight, the blue worked great. But the purple– even though I tried 3 different purples (a dark, a mid, and a light) was still too dark; it didn’t glow much in general. I’d pick a lighter purple if I did this again.
Notice how the purple just seems darker.
At this point I have one of the textures in blue (the road) but I’m still tweaking the bloom. Notice the white in most of the textures. The street lights are glowing from a blue material with emission, not a texture.
Only the blue is emissive at this point. I haven’t replaced all of the textures yet.
In addition to re-texturing, I was adding Flynn’s Hideout (aka apartment or safehouse) and heavily researching Tron lore to determine the purposes for things. I learned a LOT more about Tron that I ever wanted but it was cool to explore a world that was a computer simulation.
For example, there is a fireplace with a mantel in the hideout. I had to ask “what is fire in the Tron world?” and found that it appears to be blue transparent cubes (Tron Wiki, Flynn’s Safehouse, Trivia). Blue transparent cubes coming up! First, actually made in 3D in Blender. Then I picked a camera viewpoint and rendered one in 2D to be used with Hubs spawner. The result? Close enough. I’m still hesitant with transparency in Blender and Gimp. If I were to make these again, I would not have as many lines.
My Tron fire cube
Design Elements for Flynn’s Hideout
Should be spawn location
Can see Tron city (The Grid) from an outer deck
Includes water or meditation pool
Has angled black shiny walls (entire Tron world is black angled shiny rock)
There needs to be a book shelf in the back. Books appear to be significant in Tron lore. Books containing “text” might be the only part of the real world that computer programs can attempt to understand. The poorly done ‘do you know Jules Verne’ joke implies that programs struggle with fiction/nonfiction text.
No real food, but Flynn does eat. Note: humans are users. Users are self-powered in the Tron world. They are the only entity that is self-powered. That self-empowerment grants them somewhat of a god status in the Grid. It also allows Flynn to live separate, off the Grid, and beyond the reach of Clu.
There should be a bedroom to the side.
The fireplace has objects that seem to bemuse and simultaneously confuse Clu. I recreated this scene in my video. #CluDoesNotGetTchotchkes
Work in progress: Blender screen showing that the basic city is only 3 cubes
This series of images shows what I mean by “the textures carry the weight” and the use of negative space is compelling. The textures add what could be windows, doors, or programming through the scene. On the “roads” the textures give a sense of movement. It’s wild that all that busy city is from a few cubes, with the Mirror Modifier and some linear textures.
Tron City Elements
Apparently, it’s always dark and stormy in the Grid. Technically, it can rain and the Grid is rather proud that it can simulate rain. I did not make rain. I added some blue-tinted clouds that float across the scene via my animation. The black rock everywhere is shiny. Perhaps it is a break in the rain.
It’s always stormy in the Grid
I became much more comfortable with the Mirror Modifier in Blender in this build because the tutorial has you create the city with one mirror (i.e. X axis) but I simply added the other horizontal mirror (i.e. Y axis) for things like the roads and you quickly get a much larger symmetrical city!
The city is NOT fully symmetrical. I created some extra buildings that I manually placed into the scene.
By Nehrams2020, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6637555
My purple socket set with a neon Hubs sign
I chose not to make the Games stadium. It’s already a big build and I didn’t need another building complex for my story line.
I thought about having the Solar Sailer arrive at some sort of tethered location at an antennae. I built the building for it to arrive at (per the Tron plot). But I decided that I liked the look of it just sailing through and past better.
About that center power beam
The tutorial doesn’t care how high the beam goes up as you just get it going up out of the animation render camera shot. But since my city is immersive, I had to think about how high of a beam I wanted. The beam IS part of Tron lore and it represents communicating back with reality so I thought it should go up forever! I really thought I had a perfect application for Fading Assets Gracefully with Vertex Alpha. But with Blender 4.0 (or some version near there), alpha has changed and changed how it is done. Thus, I’m lost and could NOT get it to work. I’m sure the problem is with me and I just need to adjust to the new system, but still I’m floundering.
Still, a mantra that I keep repeating did work: There is more than one way to do things in Blender.
So I tried Hubs black fog instead. Plus, since I already knew by that time that that beam was about 500m from the spawn point, if I set the fog to 500m it should just about perfectly hide the beam until a visitor goes out to the cliff edge.
View of Tron city after just stepping outside of the HideoutView of Tron City further out on the cliff edgeWIP image: Note the elements: the cushion, the water pool, the bedroom, and the far off city.
By The Numbers
The final build of Tron City with Flynn’s Hideout: ~18MB. I’m very sure most of that were my textures. But all things considered, that’s a tiny number for a build 1 kilometer in size.
I
launched this build to celebrate Halloween. Not because it is in any
way scary, but because it is dark.
Hey, that’s as far as I go with
Halloween. 😑
But I did add a twist for my planned live tour of 3 scenes. The story line for the experience would have a beginning, middle, and end. It was not just about visiting and looking around.
Scene 1: Start in Flynn’s Hideout. A wall is hiding the full city. I will
play the music because without Behavior Graphs at this time, I did not
know how to otherwise time the wall to descend at the same time as the
“Tron” aspect of the song arrives. I invited folks to look at the
fireplace for something to do.
Tron arrival view. Notice the “Tron City” is an image on the wall.
Scene 2: Explore Tron city (The
Grid). It’s really fun to turn your movement speed up to 2.0 and zoom
down the main entry road. I did it nearly every time I visited the
build while working on it.
Scene 3 (an actual other whole Hubs scene): I switched scenes once everyone was comfortable.
The center building was replaced with a “5th Element” style duck (IYKYK),
everything now purple monotone for Halloween, and eliminated Flynn’s Hideout. The sky
changed from black to a purple/orange gradient. Inadvertently, the navigation mesh which I only flirted with in Blender, worked.
The Bummer
Unfortunately,
no one who showed up for the Halloween event knew the Tron movies. So
all of my work adding in references and allusions was for naught at the time.
😔 Hopefully I’ll be able to show this build live to a real Tron fan someday!
The Video
Because
I knew I was launching this space on October 31 at ~3:00 p.m., I
prepared all of my social media in advance of the event to be able to submit it to the show-and-tell Hubs Discord channel for October.
Other inspirations
I would like to point out some other inspirations that I used because this build took me about 8 weeks.
The Tron font generator was brilliant! Another happy accident was getting the purple neon Hubs in Tron font work well in the Hubs space.
Combination neon from the Tron font generator with Hubs bloom.
I did not know that Disney was releasing Tron: Ares
but I did notice that Tron red clips started showing up in my YouTube
searches. Tron: Ares released on October 10, 2025 and did very
poorly. My build released on October 31, 2025 and was completely unrelated!! Cringe!
I did attempt some UV scrolling but in the end, I didn’t like the effect inside of the build; it was too flashy against all the black. The neon bloom was already enough.
Early
on, I collected a few Sleeping Beauty images because I’ve been
intrigued by the angular branches on the trees in the background. These
didn’t show up in the build but I’m keeping those ideas for the future.
I did not make a Recombinant. Thought about it, because it is very basic geometry (it makes the Solar Sailer look very complex). But decided not because in the Tron lore, it is sorta a bad guy.
Easter egg hidden: I made a back door and garage where the Light Cycle starts it’s straight line run across the city. The door does not open until the wall opens, but I figured that I could direct everyone to look towards the city and NOT see the door opening behind them at the same time. That way, that Easter egg would stay mostly hidden until I pointed it out.
Lessons Learned
Keep Blender source files for everything.
Keep a Project folder in my browser for images, fonts, music, anything.
Plan the experience – I liked my 3 scene narrative plot.
Make the social media early. It is stressful but it did work.
There are MANY fan art pieces for the Tron Light Cycle (Sketchfab Tron Light Cycle search results, ArtStation search results) showing many styles, emphasizing different elements. I did giggle at a model out there that used a human with bare feet. There is even a significant difference between the Light Cycles shown at Comic Con (green and blue) and in the Tron 2 movie (orange and blue). I picked the features that I wanted to for my 3D Light Cycle object which I made in blue and purple.
The Light Cycle was a two day build and I completely restarted it once. Relatively, this was a fast build but I had a lot of fun making it. It’s too bad that it does whiz past in the actual scene, but I know it’s cool. 😎
Light cycle version 1
In my first attempt, I started with the wheels which turned out pretty good. But I was primed by this video of a Light Cycle remake. But I didn’t like that core which was a mesh cylinder.
In my second attempt, I just used a mesh cube because that was easier to use loop cuts to get faces that I could pull the arms, legs, and head from. I did add in a mesh cylinder, however, for the light “engine”. I knew that it needed an added glowing tail, but I made the texture for the Solar Sailer and reused it for what Tron lore calls the Light Cycle Ghost Tail.
Light cycle, version 2Light Cycle, with glowing transparent tail (made in GIMP).
Similar but different
POST SCRIPT: This section added
I realized after I pressed Publish (the world’s greatest proofreader) that I had not fully explained what I meant by this build utilizing negative space. Also, I need to properly give credit for the light cycle animation, which goes to Hubs community member, Theanine. I did look at his Synthcity Blender file to find out how he animated his spaceships. I was wondering: did he use a generator of some kind or did he use animation. The answer was animation.
However, while I was there looking at his blend file, I realize that there was a some common “look” from his Synthcity build and my Tron build– both used glowing colors. However, I used a negative space idea and depended on my textures to carry the work and he actually HAS the heavy work in his build.
Here is an example. In Synthcity, windows are added planes that have their own glowing material shading. In Tron, any windows are created as a result of rectangular shapes in the texture. So I didn’t build windows into my buildings. I left my buildings (all of them) as plain shapes. But when I applied the texture, I saw how Blender applied the 2D texture to a 3D shape and with little editing, I went with the results. The straight lines and dashes on the textures became apparent as windows and road paint. So I didn’t bother with the details that Theanine had, but I got a very similar result! Synthcity is going for a video game city look and Tron is going for a city as circuit board look. But Theanine was gracious to comment favorably on my Tron build and that should make all artists happy.
In the Tron 2 movie (TRON: Legacy), it is implied that Sam and Quorra fall in love on the Solar Sailer– which I find a bit rich. 😕 But the scene of them on the Solar Sailer sailing into Tron city is beautiful and I wanted to replicate that.
I used Blender make the shape of the solar sailer (easy, one day). I made the sail texture in Blender as well, which turned into what I call a happy accident when I’m making my art. I made a cylinder, shaped as a six-sided hexagon, made glowing beveled edges, duplicated it, snuggled them up to each other to fill the camera view with a good scale. I did a bit of tweaking to try to make the texture seamless but alas, no one really notices it so far into the sky. But when I went to render a 2D image out of this 3D object set, you guessed it – completely black. I had not put ANY light into the scene so Blender was like “Nope, you get completely black as a result.” So I threw a “light” source haphazardly over the scene while saying something like “Give me SOMETHING lit” and Blender rendered the texture I show in the Inspiration image—it’s a lit just a bit of left-center. And I realized— YES! That’s how I see my Solar Sailer moving through the scene! It will float through on the right side of the city so it will be “lit” from the left.
What a cool, happy accident! I ran with that texture. It’s actually one of my proudest accomplishments because instead of a flat texture, I had a texture that meant something real inside the scene (and I simply changed the color for a purple equivalent Solar Sailer).
One Hubs note here: I thought about trying to put a waypoint on the Solar Sailer so that visitors could go up and sit on it (ride it?) just like the Inspiration image above. But I did remember that Hubs doesn’t do moving objects to ride on. Later, I asked a Hubs expert about it and he said that a visitor could go to the waypoint (utilize it) but then they’ll stay on one place in space as the object the waypoint is attached to moves on. Oh well, a future version of the software will accommodate moving waypoints, I’m sure.
My Tron Solar Sailer
Tron Avatar
No Tron avatar is complete without an identity disk so I attempted that first.
Sketchfab models in wireframe mode are very helpful for buildingMy Identity Disk in blue
I customized an already available orange and white “Spaceman” avatar from Hubs, created by Jim Conrad.
I changed the base texture using GIMP and removed the air supply hose. I added a Tron Identity Disk on the back
Work in progress: Adding my Identity Disk in BlenderTron avatar blueTron avatar purple
I made a blue avatar for all of my attendees by placing it up on my Hubs instance and taking all other avatars offline for guests via the Hubs Admin Panel. Then I made a purple avatar for me to wear as host (and it was a hint that a purple Grid was coming).
In Part 3, I’ll cover the big reveal as this build was not even leaked to the public before the opening day, Halloween 2025.
From Myths to Principles: Navigating Instructional Design in Immersive Environments Part 7 Myth: Immersion creates empathy
I’ll be the first to point out that my blog posts are not published regularly. As I’ve mentioned before, this series is an updated version of an older series. But these first four myths are mostly ground I’ve covered before. Additionally, since the myths are just basic lies, it’s really hard to muster the motivation to write about them AGAIN.
Every time I have a difficult project, I weigh up working on it versus cleaning the toilet: which would I rather do? Yo, the toilet is pretty clean. So…these blog posts have not been winning that decision.
I’m truly in the dark part of the woods on this entire topic.
But what makes me continue? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
The lies keep being repeated.
In the past week [EDIT: I wrote this on February 27, 2025], I’ve heard:
In a sales pitch to a school to use VR, that there are (proven?) tangible learning outcomes.
When learners were using VR headsets, engagement happened.
I’m reminded of a baseball quote that I used to motivate my team when they were having really long hard days at work:
“You win a few, you lose a few.
Some get rained out.
But you got to dress for all of them.”
―
Satchel Paige
You’ve got to suit up for them all.
I take from this, that choosing to enter the arena is more important than the outcome of the arena. I may loose the war against false, malicious, money-making claims about XR in education, but the important point is that I chose to speak out.
So here I go, suiting up for our final myth of this series: Immersive experiences are empathy-generating experiences. Here we go.
For quite some tie, I’ve been wondering what cards FrameVR.io (hereafter called Frame) had to play in the AI-in-XR space. They were flirting with the concept right around the time of the Mozilla Hubs announced shutdown, but despite witnessing the entire XR industry contract around them, they kept claiming “We’re all in on AI”. They seemed to mean more than just AI characters in XR space. I just didn’t know how.
With Gabe Baker’s “AI In Meetings: Treading on Sacred Human Space” LinkedIn article of January 23, 2025, I got a much clearer vision. And I’m disturbed.
This post, therefore, is a response. I write it with a pang of regret, but here goes.
A Brief History of FrameVR, from Heather’s perspective
I have the date when Frame arrived on my radar: March 27, 2020. I was exploring easy-to-access XR platforms and spent some time exploring Frame with the great Scot Daniel Livingstone.
Exploring Daniel’s 360 photosphere in Frame
Frames are essentially web rooms in 3D. As Frame’s website says, “Frame is a beta product from Virbela. Frame makes it easy to communicate and collaborate in 3D environments, right from the web browser.” Frame was one of several no-download required (hence WebXR) platforms that included Mozilla Hubs, Janus, rumii, and Cryptovoxels. Similar competitors had native apps that needed to be downloaded including ENGAGE, Second Life, and Somnium Space.
Awkwardly, the landing page for Frame used to drop a visitor directly INTO a Frame, which while demonstrating what it was immediately, was unnerving for the unready. I’m glad to see now that they redirect into a more traditional webpage now that has a bit more of “who we are, what you get, and how much this costs” layout.
After that first exploration, I’d go back into Frame on and off for years, mostly for events, meetings, and conferences. To give Frame some credit, they were and still are marketed towards business or professional use, that is meetings and events. From the default spaces available to the business attire avatars, they bend to the professional market.
As of today, Frame’s top 6 use cases listed on their website are professional: team meetings, recruitment, vendor showcase, meetings, campus twins, and networking. This is not to say that they didn’t cater to the education market – they did! It’s just that most education uses were from the same list: meetings, recruitment, campus classrooms, etc. I see one “soccer strategy” use in the use cases– that’s interesting. But most the education uses are just the same as business uses. I’m going to guess that if there’s an educational use that is completely unique (Hmm…underwater basket weaving?), that’s either proprietary and therefore NOT shared by Frame or those Frames relay entirely on clients bringing their own 3D builds with them and not having Frame provide them. Either way, it looks like overall “creative” use is limited to creatively using what they already offer.
Disclosure
It’s time to veer off and talk a bit about Virbela and I have to throw out TONS of disclosures now. I owned a Virbela Virtual Campus (VC) in my role as Chief Operating Officer of the Immersive Learning Resource Network (iLRN). iLRN’s deal with Virbela was:
iLRN had unlimited capacity campus for free for spin-ups. We could generate new rooms, new building floors, new buildings, and entire new islands at our demand. (That was actually wicked fun.) In return, we paid Virbela 50% of the rent we collected on contracts that we signed into our Campus. So iLRN was a subletter.
My COO responsibility was that Campus, account management, and finances. I also conducted tours, did training, and provided tech support. We hosted some lovely events, but meetings were basically all we did. There were a few random boat rides as well.
However, as anyone that knows me could guess, I tangled horns with Virbela.
Here are two specific times:
Sales
When I came on board as COO, I was soon contacted by a Virbela employee to set up a daily meeting to ‘talk about my pipeline’. She wanted to talk about sales leads. Virbela could always see a Google doc where I kept all leads. She spent her time encouraging me to frame (haha) my conversations with future clients with Virbela essentially answering their (whatever) needed use case. Said another way, sales; I was being treated like I was a salesperson, learning the ropes.
Bear in mind that Virbela had a right to see the future as grand and rosy. 🤩🌹 I had heard informally that the home Virbela Virtual Campus had leaped from a paltry 30 visitors a day to over 300 visitors a day during the pandemic. So much traffic had increased that they staffed a concierge desk with 1 or 2 salespersons standing by for many hours each day, ready to break off, give tours, and assist in collecting specs for contracts. They saw no end to the possible companies and schools that would want to walk in and book a contract for fully made and ready to go VR space.
This request to meet everyday to discuss sales struck me very badly.
My job was not pushy sales. I’ve never loved sales. Yuck.
My ethics as a instructional designer forbids me from recommending an educational product that does NOT meet a clients’ needs. If it doesn’t fit, you don’t recommend it.
Capture from a meeting inside of the VC with a client where the VC did not fit their needs; they had users mostly with smartphone technology. VC was a native app that needs a computer. I voted against offering a contract. Fortunately, the client didn’t take one either.
We were a non-profit, so beating the bushes for money was not our style. Later, iLRN would get chided by Virbela for offering rental prices 5x lower that other Virbela campuses, to which we were stymied and replied with “You, Virbela, told us our prices.” Talk about greedy.
So one day I had a chance to fill in a “how are we doing?” Virbela survey which I thought was large and somewhat anonymous. I said “I don’t need daily watching over my sales lead pipeline.” Virbela sat me down in a following meeting and said “Sorry, I guess you don’t need daily meetings.” To which, I was more perplexed that my feedback had been directly identified with me. Oops. Either way, sales lady backed off.
Avatars
iLRN had booked in a major speaker into an event, but we also knew that this speaker would prefer to wear a hijab. We had no hijabs in our avatar collection. We checked. We checked because we knew it was important to be as ready as possible in advance for a speaker. I think we also asked Virbela if we could have hijabs on our VC. I don’t remember a response.
Our speaker arrived, worked on their avatar, and settled on a hat/hair combo that was the same color, which visually was close to a hijab. But as we thought they might, they blasted Virbela on social media, pointing out that hijabs were not available.
Before you could say spit spot, Virbela socials responded right back, “Oh but we do have hijabs! You must have missed them!”
I call bullshit. OUR VERSION of Virbela did not have them. We checked, in advance, remember? My conspiracy theory is that Virbela loaded them into our version just after the speaker complained publicly.
Total freaking bullshit, to claim that we had them. I really didn’t like the way Virbela treated the speaker OR us as their subletters.
~~
After I left iLRN, I’ve used FrameVR as a contractor to host a fun student trivia game; the ability to turn audio zones on and off was fun.
In all of my dealings with Gabe up to this point, I found him to be a kind, dedicated, upbeat, and friendly ‘would do anything to help you’ person in the WebXR world. It’s funny that I had a friend that also knew Gabe but confusingly (to me), he did NOT get along with Gabe at all. I eventually broke off that friendship but I joked that “In the divorce, I got Gabe.” 😁
The horizon darkens
When Mozilla announced that they were no longer be supporting their Hubs WebXR product, Gabe wrote a lovely tribute initially on LinkedIn. I thought it was a classy move, given that FrameVR and Hubs had been up to that point been direct competitors. I was hoping that Gabe would hold Frame above the fray that was about to happen over at Hubs…but alas, in reply to one comment on his post, he pitched Frame to a listless Hubs user.
Oh. Those warm fuzzies were nice while they lasted. 🤦 But, abrupt end.
Seeing XR companies contracting and closing (AltspaceVR closed in March 2023, Mozilla Hubs closed in May 2024), I wondered how Gabe was seeing Frame go forward. He kept sending out the “Frame’s going all in for AI”-type message.
From the title of Gabe’s January 23, 2025 article AI In Meetings Treading on Sacred Human Space, I was a bit hopeful thinking, “OK, an acknowledgement that humans have such a thing as sacred space…and it means something.” Initially, Gabe does a good job acknowledging the tasks that AI does well and not well in meeting space (because remember Virbela/Frame is all about meetings). It really sounds like Gabe has had a year+ of AI attending meetings and he’s got his finger on the pulse of what works and what does not. Still, most of his examples are stale & predictable.
He seems to claim that when teams are talking about something, “seeing it” in 3D is the next and better step to take:
“When people come together to meet, I think there should be as little friction as possible when this question comes up:“I wonder what that would look like?””
Yet many meetings don’t need 3D or a visualization at all (i.e. working on accounting on a spreadsheet or writing for a webpage).
Red flag
In as much as I want to give Gabe all kinds of doubt, with this, my spidey-sense meter went to 100:
“As someone who has seen how helpful AI can be across many domains,
I desperately want AI to be present and accessible during meetings.
When people see the results of our vision, they will want it too. In
fact, I think it will seem silly not to have it!
Those whodon’twant
it will be the people who really want to seem like the smartest person
in the room at all times. But those who are interested in results and
not ego will be happy to have AI-powered teammates at their meetings.”
Wait, what?
People who don’t want AI in a meeting room ‘want to seem like the smartest person in the room’?
Gabe made it seem as through if you are anti-AI, you are anti-Google, anti-learning, and much worse, egotistical! I guess privacy got checked at the door? For the record, I’m very pro-Google and pro-internet use during meetings or classes.
This specific statement is a red flag because it is an emotionally laden argument popping right out of the middle of this discussion. It is as if Gabe ran out of patience and burst out “If you don’t want AI, you’re an ego monster!” 😠
When a calm reasonable discussion suddenly goes emotional, something is wrong. Gabe lost his shit for a moment there. As Spock would say “Reverting to name-calling suggests that you are defensive and therefore find my opinion valid.” So, he’s probably getting pushback on this AI thing.
I hoped he didn’t really mean it so I read on.
Nope, he doubled down…I mean tripled down. He wants AI agents in every meeting, in the name of eliminating duplicated work across companies. (So much for visualization?) He wants AI inserting itself fully into conversations, setting up follow up meetings etc.
Is anyone else getting a creepy feeling here? This is way beyond “all meetings will be recorded” –which would make me make tracks outta there anyways. The invasion of freedom of speech (because some folks will NOT say things if they knew they were going to be hyper-on-the-record) during work meetings will be staggering. Stymied talk equals failing organizations and failing people. This is going to end badly.
OK, so here’s the $64,000 question: Would I, as a consultant, recommend Frame for educational contexts in the future?
My answer: I’ve agonized over this, but I probably could not recommend it. I cannot in good faith recommend using a platform that might record children or learners without their expressed consent and use those recordings, summaries, or derivatives for a future plethora of uses not being disclosed now. It’s not worth it to “visualize” a solution or have an AI set a future meeting. I can do those on my own, thanks.
For the moment, I find that sacred human space IS being treaded upon. I can’t in good faith say that’s a direction that education needs to go.
The next myth is that learning in immersive experiences is active, kinesthetic, or like an internship, which is “the way most people learn best” (D’Agostino, 2022, para 17.)
Active learning was first associated with immersive experiences because learners could observe or engage with or, more properly described, engage within simulations (Dede, 2009). The term active simply meant that the learner was present at a simulated place and time; the original use of the active learning phrase with reference to immersive experiences did not imply that a learner could do anything other than observe. The emphasis was much more on the time and space travel afforded by XR.
This claim has been controversial (Khorasani et al., 2023), in part because of the differing degrees of activity that a learner can have – ranging from simply being inside an immersive environment and observing (e.g. historical re-enactment simulations) to taking actions that have non-trivial consequences (e.g. practicing a surgical technique).
Active learning is a phrase on the move
Dede (2009) referred to actional immersion as situations where learner actions have “novel, intriguing consequences” that are “highly motivating and sharply focus attention.” (p. 66). The active learning claim moved from a focus on the learner’s actions and instead focused on the learner’s body ownership illusion. Further, the relationship between user bodies and virtual depictions (avatars) was reformulated and later called implicit learning (Slater, 2017, p. 29).
I want to pause here and really dissect the difference because in this area, there has definitely been vocabulary “drift”. Learner’s actions focus on what the learner causes to happen. Learner’s body ownership focuses on parts of the body that the learner uses to cause actions.
For example, picture a chemistry lab simulation.
Image: Labster
Focusing on the learner’s actions means that we could use a 2D display screen and mouse and have the learner click on the pipette, click on a liquid to suck up with the pipette, and then click on a vial within which to dispense the liquid. Those could be right to left actions, but the learner is causing the actions to happen on the screen. They are using a mouse and moving their hand generally right to left. No hand needs to be visible to do these actions. Activities could be “ghost like” in that they could be caused by no visual physical object whatsoever. In reality, the computer mouse is doing the most physical ‘work’.
Focusing on the learner’s body ownership however, would have the learner reaching out (they need to be able to reach) to the pipette, to grab it (they need to be able to firmly grasp), to possible depress the button on the top to create the needed suction, to move the pipette, see the liquid and subsequent vial, and depress the button to dispense the liquid. The movements could be all right to left. Key in this visual depiction, however, is A HAND with workable fingers that is somehow connection via experience to a learner’s IRL hand.
In the former example, the learner causes the actions to occur but we are not focused on their body parts doing the action. In the latter example, we are very interested in the body parts doing work that is replicate (in this case) to the real world work of operating a pipette. In the former, we could have confidence that a learner is exposed to the cause and effect of pipette work; it sucks up a reliable amount of liquid and can squirt it back out. In the latter, we could have confidence that a learner is exposed to how pipettes physically work (button press down equal prime for suck, release equals suck, button press down again equals squirt).
See that the focus is different?
My point is that the FOCUS of what was coming to be called active learning with reference to XR was changing already between 2009 and 2017.
Drawing from the educational history of the Montessori method and considering the interfaces available within immersive experiences, implicit bodily learning (from 2017) transformed to embodied learning (by 2018). Indeed, Johnson-Glenberg initially postulated that “doing actual physical gestures in a virtual environment should have positive, and lasting, effects on learning in the real world” (2018, p. 1). Movement became synonymous with active learning. “Active, motor-driven concepts may stimulate distributed semantic networks (meaning), as well as the associated motor cortices which would have been used to learn long ago, in childhood” (Johson Glenberg, 2018 p. 3). [Hat tip, by the way to all research into the mind-body connection within learning. This post throws no shade on the phenomena.] With specific, other than meaningful, actions now excluded, some researchers appeared to support the claim that all movement somehow begets learning. (That sentence is confusing, I wrote it and even I’m wondering what I meant. It’s this: Inside a XR-for-learning experience, a learner might be instructed to do something. Pick this up, move it there. Because that learning is specific to the learning event, I’m setting it aside. It’s not part of this argument. What I am referring to are the learner-instigated but non-instructed movements. Let’s say, a learner joins XR and wanders to the left for 2 minutes before a lesson begins. Or let’s say instead of looking to the “front” at the end of the experience, the learner is looking to the “back”. These random but learner-instigated actions are…wait for it…somehow the secret sauce of learning in XR. I kid you not. I really try to pin down the meaning from educators that belief this myth and THIS is what they come up with; because you can move in XR, you are learning (more) in XR.
The supporting hypothesis then became that immersive experiences are an inherently active learning method precisely because the learner can move.
I’m going to repeat that for emphasis:
The supporting hypothesis then became
that immersive experiences are an inherently active learning method
precisely because the learner can move.
The Emperor’s New Clothes. Image by Helen Stratton, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Did you catch that? Are you catching on? Aren’t the emperor’s new clothes splendid?
By incorporating the word “active” educators are reminded of the belief that active learning is better than passive learning (Slater, 2017). Ooo! Shade thrown there, for sure, because no teacher wants to be accused of being a passive educator.
[BTW, there is reams of garbage research out there for anyone looking for a topic. Go ahead and dig into active versus passive in educational psychology papers. It’s almost as big of a research garbage dump as XR; teachers radically redefine and appeal to this topic. My point is that the appeal to “active learning” when coupled with XR provides scant evidence of such. To this day, I RARELY see active learning in XR.]
Let’s bear down now. To be specific, the ‘active learning’ coupling with ‘XR’ claim is not about being fidgety, randomly moving about, or purely reacting as a user would in a game. It is movement, usually performed by the learner via an avatar or minimally via hand controllers where the learner is autonomously and purposely manipulating content. This is known as embodiment or embodied learning (Johnson-Glenberg, 2018; Markowitz et al., 2018) although definitions of embodiment vary. The definitions vary including how much a learner is embodied. It should also be noted that the term embodiment is often used interchangeably with ‘embodied learning’, which is a theory that the meaningful gestures in and with the environment aid a learner’s cognitive processes (that’s the no shade thing I referred to earlier). But even ’embodiment’ and ’embodied learning’ are slightly different things. Whew! Keeping up?
The Emperor’s clothes should be splendid
In 2018, Johnson-Glenberg claimed that presence and embodiment were “profound affordances” of immersive environments and this embodiment affordance should facilitate learner control, also known as agency (p. 1). One further hat tip to Mina: she did actually use a somewhat scientific body action in her research –I believe it was catching butterflies with a butterfly net– something that biologists WOULD do with their bodies. So it’s a real world action. I point this out because some XR actions are nonsensical. I’m looking at you people who change vocabulary words to bouncing balls or something.
But aren’t
A follow-up paper by Mina, however, found that while embodiment does have a connection to learning, it does not exclusively cause learning, or perhaps better said, it doesn’t interact with learning. Referring to high or low embodied VR and the connection to learning, “platform is not destiny” (Johnson‐Glenberg et al., 2021, p. 20). So in lay talk that means it had no effect.
A capture that fell flat with the audience: VR had no effect on learning, even when embodied.
This confounding (confusing/muddling up/drift of vocabulary) of movement in immersive experiences with active learning forms the myth. Because active learning is considered better than passive learning, claims are made that immersive experiences must cause more learning due to the body-movement connection. The research, however, does not support that claim.
The active learning myth appears to be referred to more often in academic literature than evidence to the contrary. It is true that immersive experiences can allow for more movement-based learning experiences than other forms of media, but it is not definitive that immersive experiences cause learning simply because they can contain learner movement or agency.
Just because you can move in XR, doesn’t mean you do learn. Full stop.
Part 7 will be our last myth for this series: Immersive learning causes empathy.
Johnson-Glenberg, M. C. (2018). Immersive VR and education: Embodied design principles that include gesture and hand controls. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 81.
Johnson‐Glenberg, M. C., Bartolomea, H., & Kalina, E. (2021). Platform is not destiny: Embodied learning effects comparing 2D desktop to 3D virtual reality STEM experiences. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 37(5), 1263-1284.
Khorasani, S., Syiem, B. V., Nawaz, S., Knibbe, J., & Velloso, E. (2023). Hands-on or hands-off: Deciphering the impact of interactivity on embodied learning in VR. Computers & Education: X Reality, 3, 100037.
Markowitz, D. M., Laha, R., Perone, B. P., Pea, R. D., & Bailenson, J. N. (2018). Immersive virtual reality field trips facilitate learning about climate change. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2364.
Slater, M. (2017). Implicit learning through embodiment in immersive virtual reality. Virtual, augmented, and mixed realities in education, 19-33.
The content cannot be used to train or be reviewed by AI. All copyrights retained.
Did you miss the other parts of this series? Here they are!
Happy Twelvetide or the name you might recognize, The 12 Days of Christmas! For
you, I’ve arranged 12 of my most favorite XR-for-education examples.
These are virtual sites, simulations, companies, or concepts. But what’s a good story without some twists? – Some of these no longer exist. Let that twist your noodle. 😕 – Some are concepts. – These were originally posted to LinkedIn as separate posts. This blog posts represents all 12 in one place (so buckle up, this will be long).
Day 1 Heritage Key
Happy Twelvetide! Number 1 on my 12 favorite
XR-for-education list is Heritage Key by Rezzable. It was in Second Life
and then Open Sim ~2008-2010, but no longer exists. Visitors could
visit recreations of Stonehenge or the Valley of the Kings. My fav parts? –
Users **participated** in the building of Stonehenge. (THINK: NPCs
giving instructions to quests in games.) Did you know that there were
different versions of Stonehenge over thousands of years, including a
wooden one? –
Time travel – The Stonehenge location (if I’m remembering it correctly)
had “time travel” for visitors to go to Stonehenge in different times
by directing users BACK to an underground Visitors Center where
(unbeknownst to the visitors) the overhead scene would change and go
forward ~500 years or something. Nice time travel technique! –
Avatar clothing. Each location offered avatars garb to wear appropriate
to the builds (all of them, at once). I remember the choices where:
Druid-theme, Thebes-theme, or Indiana Jones-theme. All a super fun way
for users to keep playing along with “we are participating with” these
locations. THINK: DRESS FOR THE JOB YOU WANT. Will
someone resurrect this concept fully, please? It was so cool despite
being from more than 10 years ago. And it outperforms a lot of XR for
education even today.
YouTube video from Heritage Key: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SqTwaa0HVg
IMAGE 1: Capture from Heritage Key of a clearing in a woods scene of a male avatar
carrying a log to assist in the building of Stonehenge. A further
female Indiana-Jone type character (that was me) is seen just behind.
Circa 2010.
IMAGE 2: Capture from
Heritage Key tour that I believe Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable
took back in 2010. Image shows a scene in Thebes between palaces and
temples. Avatars are dressed in Egyptian, Druid, or Indiana Jones-like
apparel.
Happy Twelvetide! Number 2 on my 12 favorite XR-for-education list is NASA goes to Mars! My fav parts? – Users had first person experiences walking around a Martian base in 2008. –
This kind of build checks every one of my ‘saves time, money, danger’
boxes and as such, represents a great investment in XR. Experiences like
this should be replicated. Yes, this
is another defunct XR location, however there are still space clubs in
Second Life and other platforms have picked up the gauntlet to recreate
Mars, the Moon, and beyond. Is NASA
done with virtual reality? Far from it. She’s just grown with the times.
One of my favorite XR-for-education things that NASA has done recently
is the First Woman graphic novel (comic book) demonstrating the
diversity of thought that it will take to get successfully back to the
moon. It’s XR-enabled and I’m happy to report that RT (the waving robot)
has visited my living room.
IMAGE 1: Capture from NASA CoLab recreation of
the Victoria Crater on Mars. Capture credit: Eric Hackathorn, NOAA,
February 22 2008. Source:https://lnkd.in/gWFu7aKnImage is in the public domain.
IMAGE
2: Capture from NASA website about First Woman. Comic book style scene
from the angle of moon boots shows a nearby moon rover with a robot
waving in the back seat.
IMAGE 3: Capture of cover of the First Woman, NASA’s Promise To Humanity, Issue Number 1 Dream to Reality graphic novel.
Happy Day 3 of the 12 Days of Christmas! Today’s favorite XR-for-education example is for the curious#InstructionalDesignersout there, wondering “how do you design instruction in#VirtualReality?” I
suggest this example from the Grand Cache Tourism and Interpretive
Centre, that I saw demonstrated by Mike McCready of Lethbridge College,
Alberta. This is the best example of instructions given in a VR
experience that I’ve seen! I
should disclose my judging bias– I have taken many science labs in my
time and a good set of lab instructions is a good set of instructions.
Full stop. So these are good instructions. Direct, to the point, and
helpful for completing the task at hand. Not too much detail in the
objects presented to the learners and completing the lab *should* be
within the physical capabilities of VR controllers (grabbing, placing,
brushing, etc). Modification of target sizes could be done for#Accessibility.
I’m guessing that the VR artist and developer, Benjamin Blackwell,
transposed real life lab instructions. I could be wrong, maybe someone
wrote these instructions for the VR experience. But hey, either way, it
works! The
backstory of this VR experience isn’t bad either as it DOES tick
Heather’s boxes of saving time, money, and danger. The real world
dinosaur footprints are up on a sheer rock face at an angle in a
preservation area. Getting there takes time, doing a dinosaur imprint
IRL costs money (for supplies), and the location itself is dangerous to
learners (and to environmental & historical damage). (Source:https://lnkd.in/gcWjFBXb) There’s
a chance I would suggest adding an element that increases the stress
level for learners (what??) but that’s just to add a narrative to the
experience. I would throw in an approaching thunderstorm that the
learners have to boogie and get out of the site ASAP. But hey, I like
narratives with my educational XR. I do not endorse any Lethbridge College program.
IMAGE: Capture showing entry instructions for VR controllers.
IMAGE
3: Capture of prep table for taking a plaster cast of a dinosaur
imprint. Equipment on the table includes a bag to carry the supplies up
to the footprint location.
IMAGE 4:
Capture showing that learners have to use a spray (I think it was an
adhesive) to position the frame in place to hold the plaster.
IMAGE 5: Capture of the user grabbing the wooden frame to place over the footprint.
IMAGE 6: Capture from a Lethbridge College site showing the angled sheer rock face with the dinosaur footprints.
Happy Day 4 of Twelvetide, where I’m sharing 12
of my XR-for-education favorites! Today’s example is a concept– XR for
distraction/pain management.
I’ll admit
that this example is tangentially associated with education. But two of
the three examples I’m sharing are targeted for children. So in a way,
VR is part of helping the children learn to live healthier lives! 1.
VR Vaccines – using VR to distract children during vaccine
administration. Combine this with the “Buzzy” concept and I think the
entire fear of needles (for anyone) could be eliminated!https://lnkd.in/gQsn39W9 2.
VR in a MRI – LOVE this but it’s still experimental. My favorite part
of this design is that the clicks and whir sounds are incorporated INTO
the VR experience. (Learning what the “sounds” mean is part of fear of
flying courses so I think this could be incorporated into future virtual
reality fear of flying experiences too.)https://lnkd.in/gZ6xnPEz 3.
VR for pain management. There are several companies working on this and
kudos to ALL OF THEM! But I’ll shine a light on my friendHeather Bucalos, RNand her advocacy of using it for hospital patients (https://lnkd.in/g8s7q4_y). It looks likeBeth Savoldellihas a new initiative coming up in 2024, the XR Impact Network. Best wishes to all!
IMAGE
2: Capture from inside VR Vaccines where the user is about to have a
special stone placed on their arm at the same timing as a vaccination.
The user is presented with a story about how the stone “protects” them.
IMAGE
3: VR use during an MRI. Experimental but includes the typical sounds
of an MRI and particularly helpful for children to stay still and calm
during the procedure.
For Day 5 of Twelvetide, where I’m sharing 12 of
my XR-for-education favorites, I list National Geographic Explore VR,
whose name, perhaps in a clever move, puts the “VR” in the right
place…last. It just HAPPENS to occur inside the media of VR, but the
star of the show IS the Nat Geo content. My favs of this? This puts the explore in Explore VR. Basically if you want to use VR to go places, this is your golden ticket. Plus,
there is an impressive story line (I’m referring ONLY to the Antarctica
experience here): going from a ship, via kayak, to an ice shelf,
climbing it, and then waiting out an Antarctic storm in a camp.
(Playthrough video here:https://lnkd.in/ggMtNxy8) When I taught an Introduction to XR (Design) course using the Quest 2s (https://lnkd.in/gYi9RWCU),
I placed Nat Geo as the very first experience in the course after the
Oculus First Steps primer. I also framed it within the design element of
Function. That is, does the experience take advantage of VR
affordances? If not, could it be done some other way just as well? In
the case of exploring, there is a long history of high quality National
Geographic TV shows. Could doing something in VR measure up? In
this case, the learner has to paddle their kayak, choose and take their
own photos (they are on a mission from Nat Geo, of course, to get
photographs), and climb an ice shelf. Either way, it’s arm work! So
the user is not simply a viewer as would be for a TV show. There are a
few folks right here that would like to pipe up and state that the
movement *causes* learning or as I saw it phrased the other day: “It
feels more like an earned learned experience than something you
passively learned about or were informed about,” Bill Briggs, Deloitte
CTO, told VentureBeat. “The retention and recall is just higher. Your
brain is storing it in a different place.” That’s a bunch of horse hockey. Your
brain is storing it in a different place? Oh, like that prepper
pantry? Experiences ARE experiences. Full stop. The brain encodes them
exactly the same, whether they are in VR or IRL. What this person was
doing was a backhand slap at traditional instruction (code word:
passive), which (according to them) has been dreadful for ages. On
behalf of all teachers…thanks? (not really, grr) But
I digress. Back to enjoying Nat Geo because they did a good job. It’s a
good starter experience if you can afford it for your learners. It’s
listed at US$9.99 in the Meta Quest store.
IMAGE: Capture from inside of Explore VR looking down to see some whales in a small bay dotted with icebergs.
IMAGE: Capture from the Meta Quest store of the purchase page from National Geographic Explore VR.
Trigger warning: today’s entry refers to sexual violence.
I went to an entrepreneurial conference last year to speak on the topic of the metaverse. I know my ad hoc speaking style (which I enjoy but I lose my train of thought), so in advance I scribbled up a list of truly GREAT applications of virtual reality so that I could glance at it. Today’s entry made that list.
A VR for conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) pilot study includes everything from seeing a courtroom in advance, seeing visual assurances of identity protection, reenactments, and post trauma healing and comfort. I see it is still in the experimental stage but the results are about to come in.
In September 2019, I was sexually attacked. I had to describe the event to the State Police three times. A friend rushed to me, took one look at me, and said that I was in shock. The shock goes on for a long time. I can only imagine what circumstances are like when sexual attacks occur as part of conflict or war. Therefore, I wish this pilot Godspeed.
Good on yer to the sponsors: The Royal College of Art, Immersonal, Frontier Tech Hub, UK International Development, and the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.
Day 7 from my 12 Days of Christmas favorite VR-for-education examples is a multi-step process. We have to time travel back. I’m going to stop our time machine at 14 years ago, the year 2010. NOAA had built their 2nd iteration of a tsunami simulation on their Second Life island, Meteora, that my old friend and colleague AJ Kelton captured in video here: https://lnkd.in/dCNDXnAH. (To see an even OLDER version of the same simulation, see video here https://lnkd.in/d2csDTyA) On the timeline, 2004 the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami was just 6 years prior when an estimated 227,000 people died (https://lnkd.in/du6sTWGt)
OK, Heather, this looks chunky and old. What’s the deal?
The point is that NOAA only built 5 experiences in VR– and a tsunami remained one of them (https://lnkd.in/dGD62bv6). I’m going to go out on a limb and state that NOAA thought it was *important* that humanity learn what tsunamis are and why you just can’t “outrun them”.
Why was XR a good choice for this particular natural hazard?
Because in XR, the viewer can stand still and let the tsunami wash over them and get a hint at it’s height, power, and devastation. (Hat tip to the movie, The Impossible for their depiction here https://lnkd.in/dSx-PHnv). READ: Avatar height actually means something here.
Time machine forward to 2011, March 11 and the Great East Japan Earthquake. (https://lnkd.in/djjVKSsP ) For the first time, humanity would see in real terms the devastation of a tsunami.
Fast forward one more time to 2016 and simulations advanced to this stage (see video clip below). By now, humanity had begun to take tsunamis MUCH more seriously with early warning buoys, escape routes, and *hopefully* people evacuating the coast when it could happen.
Do you see the connection between SEEING what a tsunami could do and future safety? Humans have a habit of clinging to “seeing is believing.”
It is areas like this that hit my 3-item (time, money, danger) checklist hard and for the good: XR for reducing danger.
In a sad twist, I’m late getting this posted on January 3 and another earthquake and tsunami occurred in Japan on the day I should have posted this, January 1, 2024. Thankfully, it appears that warnings went up fast and folks did evacuate. (Edit: I’ve now heard that at least 200+ people have died.)
In summary, we can’t look at this Day 7 example outside of its historical context. More emphasis on the real dangers of tsunamis can save lives.
Day 8 of my Twelvetide favorite examples of XR-for-education is a true favorite. If you’ve never been in the metaverse, I’ll take you here first: the Apart Gallery.
4. Click Accept to agree to your avatar. (Yup, you can change it here if you want or you can change it later, either way. Because metaverse!)
5. Turning on mics is optional so you can skip that if you want. Click on Enter Room.
See? 5 Clicks. And if you’ve been in before, it’s actually 4 clicks b/c your browser will remember you.
This is WebXR, the spatial web, or the immersive web. Names are not yet nailed down because it’s still relatively new. You entered the metaverse with your browser. That doesn’t sound like much, but to gamers, it’s a big deal.
Gamers are used to:
– Large downloads
– Required log-ins
– Running extra programs for sound or dialog.
– Turning off other programs to preserve memory and increase speed.
– All kinds of special doohickeys.
In this example, hosted by Mozilla Hubs, you don’t need to do any of that. You are free as a bird! (Movement is with your W,A,S,D keys and your mouse).
This *particular* example is on my list of favorites because of this ease of entry. It’s the comfortable on-ramp into the metaverse. 🚗
But there is one OTHER reason why I take newbies to the Apart Gallery. It’s an art gallery and it’s a time capsule of a sliver of American time. The original gallery artwork was produced between February and April 2020. Think back to what we were doing then:
– Social distancing
– Stay home
– Wash your hands
We were NOT talking about immunizations, unnecessary lock downs, and vulnerable populations. We didn’t even know COVID could be airborne. The artwork reflects the public health propaganda of those months. I use that word NEUTRALLY, not in a negative way. (I’m FOR public health!!) The word propaganda to me means “relaying an idea that you want someone to agree with”. Another word might be “rhetoric”. It’s fascinating to look back on what we were telling each other might work. Truly, we have our own stories now, just like the haunting stories from the 1918 flu.
The great folks at Paradowski Creative have since expanded the build so if you have time, wander around a bit. Not every version of the coming metaverse will be Second Life 2.0 ( 😏 ).
Today’s entry in my 12 Days of Christmas favorite XR-for-education examples is an odd one. For all those independent projects, developers, and small teams slogging away on tiny VR experiences and wondering…does anyone notice this?
My answer is YES.
I received exposure to the Naturalist’s Workshop (from North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences https://lnkd.in/duyS4xaW ) via a colleague. While I’m sure it’s great for learning some basic tree identification (yes!) I liked it for the basic design and how I could use THIS design to teach some elements of basic spatial design to others. How do you situate a learner in a virtual space? How close is everything? How far away? Does the learner have to walk?
I didn’t use this experience with any instructions. It was just headset on, app on, and go. So I didn’t even know it had a name or purpose. I was plopped in a small clearing in a forest on a slightly elevated concrete-looking platform with a desk and some stuff.
I did some basic spatial awareness practice. I looked at my hands. I looked at my feet. I looked to the front, to the left, to the right, behind me, below me, and above me (oh! Nice opening the tree canopy). I looked at my stomach (missing. huh.) So users have no avatars. But they don’t need them to identify trees, do they? Even though the area is closed in, it did NOT feel claustrophobic at all…because trees just fade off into the distance. The color theme is a bright spring green. The platform had a low knee-level wall and 2 gaps for going out into the forest (cough, expansion plans please!)
I bent down and looked under the desk and then discovered that the desk drawers do open! Hey there is stuff inside! So I started to pick those things up and when I placed them on the desk, something happened. Sometimes, I was temporarily transported to a 360 degree photo with one tree dominant in my view. Oh! I had placed an object FROM the tree (a leaf or a seed) into a place and could learn more about it! Level 1 tree identification unlocked.
You can get this app via SideQuest.
It’s paced at 5-15 minutes. I assume the 5 minute-rs would know what they are doing. I’d say it’s nicely at the 20 minute mark if you want to fool around.
It’s little projects like this (and the Dinosaur Track cast from Day 3) that are actually moving us forward in the XR for learning market. It doesn’t escape me that both were built in partnership between a university and a museum. Are you writing this down? You should be.
Happy Day 10 of the 12 Days of Christmas! You’re
probably getting tired of this by now, aren’t you? But we are almost to
the end! For today, my favorite
example of XR-for-education is back to a concept– NOT a specific
platform, app, or game. The concept is sandboxes. No,
these are not virtual boxes on the ground filled with sand. These are
locations in virtual reality where users are endowed as creators.
Virtual reality needs these spaces. I’m reminded of the name of one of
my favorite Facebook groups, I Require Art. I feel like that name needs a
second clause “like I need air.” Virtual reality needs places where
users of any kind can experiment. I’m
going to name 2 platforms because they meet this standard: Upon entry,
users are endowed as creators. Of course, it often matters where you are
standing. You can’t just create anywhere and everywhere. You must have
wisdom about this. When I first
described Second Life to my best educational psychology friend and said
“All users are endowed as creators”, he quipped back “Oh, you all can
have God complexes!” God, I loved working with that guy. He both kept me
grounded and pointed to the stars. But,
yes, users can have God complexes. Or to put it more finely, users can
explore their desires to create, to shape their world, to build, to
paint, to sculpt, to cook, or do all kinds of creative things that
humans have been doing for millennia. I
used to have a tiny patch of ground in Second Life, thanks to a grant
to educators via Montclair State University in New Jersey. I could
build whatever I wanted (that was free b/c I was cheap). I set up a
free pavilion, campfire, and space-pod office where-in I placed a
Tiffany lamp and tiny velociraptor, as one would do. It wasn’t much,
but it was my space. I found that this location (https://lnkd.in/ek8h-22F) does
a good job of explaining a virtual sandbox. I don’t know them, but they
show the connection between space available, what you can do (rules),
and technical specifications (prim/polygon or memory sizes).
In
the world of WebXR, Hubs allows for users to be creators from their
first moment. As long as the space you are inside of standing allows it,
you can bring in your own .glb files or surf over to Sketchfab. What’s my fav? Humans
are creators. We bring order to chaos. The freedom to create is
important and yes, I think it is as important as air is to breathing.
None of our other human endeavors would have value if we didn’t have art
to express meaning. Onward artists, onward! Post
script: You might not know that most XR platforms do not endow users as
creators. There could be costs, permissions, or it is simply not
available. That’s why this feature is remarkable. (I actually do NOT know the platform Sandbox VR and this post does not constitute an endorsement.)
Day 11 of the 12 Days of Christmas of my favorite XR-for-education examples! Today is another “concept”– it is action. I have some colleagues in the XR industry that believe that movement in XR is the best possible affordance of XR. I have disagreed with them.
See one example where a researcher hypothesized that movement in XR would cause more learning and then (gasp!) found that it made no difference: Johnson‐Glenberg, M. C., Bartolomea, H., & Kalina, E. (2021). Platform is not destiny: Embodied learning effects comparing 2D desktop to 3D virtual reality STEM experiences. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 37(5), 1263-1284.
But today I’m splitting that action hair super fine.
I’m actually FOR movement in XR when it facilitates learning. Said another way: when all other media choices would not allow for equivalent movement in a situation (or if movement in XR is a brand new thing under the sun), movement, then, in XR is, yes, helpful. I would not say it is the end-all be-all of XR-for-learning but it can help (facilitate) learning. I’m hinting at neuroscience and body memory.
For example, using XR before approaching a large, moving, and dangerous piece of equipment like a windmill to learn maintenance. YES. This is a good use of movement in XR because it makes something happen that no other form of media would easily do (not a drone or first person GoPro video). If it would be dangerous to approach with zero training, XR can provide action practice use of the equipment in a safe way.
Want some sources to support that?
Here you go:
Students at the University of East London practice using PCR equipment in XR before using it in real life. https://lnkd.in/eKhkRWks
Potential workers in windmill maintenance get exposed to the work conditions in XR to decide if they really want to pursue this career
And the now somewhat buried Lowe’s Home Improvement Store use of VR to teach skills like bathroom tiling to customers https://lnkd.in/emJF7KRr
Other versions of “action” include programs like Tiltbrush or possibly GravitySketch that allow users to move and create from inside of XR, not on the outside and bring art of object creations into XR like is the current method with programs like Unity, Unreal, and Blender.
The key to remember here is: compare the XR experience to its closest cognitively competitor experience. (READ: if the experience is processed in the brain the same way). If XR is faster or cheaper or safer than that competitor choice, XR is the way to go.
Video clip from Simulwind. Capture shows the user selecting and placing the correct size wrench to open an equipment panel.
Last but far from least, my 12th favorite XR-for-education example has, as far as I discern right now, the strongest connection between USE and LEARNING. (Translation: a safe bet!)
It’s XR for the emergency and military services– fire, medical, police, and military. As the daughter of a fire instructor, this use just makes me smile. I’m sure my Dad would have LOVED this. He loved teaching and learning via fire simulations– there was no time his skills shone brighter than helping trainee firefighters learn things like fire behavior, untapped rural water sources, and fire site safety. I’m sure I got my “adult educator” genes from him.
By now, I don’t have to tell you how XR for training uses here ticks every box of saving time, saving money, and reducing danger.
But I’ll spend this last moment on the list hinting – indeed – to the intriguing research connection here. What is it about emergency situations that makes XR work so well? I don’t know! The emotional hype? The practice-so-many-times-until-you-can-do-it-in-your-sleep-ness? The visual SEEING of emergency situations– and living thereafter?
So much cool depth to explore here, but in the meantime, using XR for these uses has my endorsement. May we never need these services, but I’m glad that our service people are getting well trained in the meantime.
Ending my 12 Days of Christmas on Epiphany (whew!) I wish you the gifts of peace, happiness, and good health in the New Year!
If I were you, by now, I’d be asking, “Heather, why are you doing this? Why are you stirring the pot? You claim to be pro-XR for education but you are reviving research from long ago just to pick on it. It’s old news.”
[To protect identity, I am PURPOSELY going to change some things by asking AI to rename and reword some of these statements.]
Heather steps up the microphone and says “Within the past 3 weeks…
New Journal
We’ve seen the launch of the International Journal of Emerging and Disruptive Innovation in Education : VISIONARIUM
Title proper: VISIONARIUM :
Abbreviated key-title: Visionarium
Other variant title: iJEDIE
Other variant title: International journal of emerging and disruptive innovation in education
Original alphabet of title: Basic roman
Subject: Dewey : 371
Subject: Education, teaching, training of special groups of persons. Special schools
Corporate contributor: Lindenwood University.
Publisher: [St. Charles Missouri]: Lindenwood University, 2023-
Note: Volume 1, issue 1 (2023); title from cover image (digitalcommons.lindenwood.edu viewed Aug. 8, 2023).
Medium: Online
Indexed by: ROAD
Journal summary:
The journal provides a diverse, interdisciplinary forum for the
publication of original peer-reviewed scholarship, data, and research
addressing intersections of education and technology. Education in all
domains increasingly incorporates emerging technologies and their novel use in learning environments, such as current pedagogical explorations of gamification, mobile and adaptive learning, digital humanities,
machine learning, blockchain, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and
Immersive Realities, to support innovative teaching methods and engaging
learning experiences. With the rise of new educational platforms and
metaverses, iJEDIE focuses on emerging trends in research to bridge the
artificial divide between scholarship and innovative pedagogical
applications. Submissions to iJEDIE will include, but are not limited
to, the following themes of interest:
Emerging technology and pedagogical application in specific disciplines or learning environments
Issues and applications in secondary education
Issues and applications in post-secondary education
Application of education technology in enterprise, industry, and nonprofit environments
I’m sorry, could you hit me over the head with the word application one more time?
Published by Lindenwood University -a NOT regionally accredited
institution, however, their Teacher education program (which this would
appear to be under the auspices of) is CAEP accredited. Unfortunately,
it’s not a strong tie to claim that a particular university or
institution’s reputation applies to the people within. It’s very
possible (and I’ve seen it!) but it’s a weak link, IMO, as great
researchers can be within poor institutions and vice versa.
Interesting how the journal description looks like the panel it was derived from…
“April 21, 2023, the Senior Editorial Board and organizing committee of the International Journal of Emerging and Disruptive Innovation in Education (iJEDIE)
hosted a panel of speakers on Emerging Technologies and the Future of
Education. The session invited researchers and practitioners from a wide
range of fields, including Education Technology, Digital Humanities,
Extended Reality (XR), Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, and
more. Speakers will discuss their recent research into how emerging
technologies may be used to disrupt, enhance, and/or revolutionize
traditional approaches to education for the benefit of both teachers and
learners.
I italicized and/or bolded the similar wording between the panel and the journal.
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a very strong “applications” vibe here. Notice how application is contrasted to research. Hmm…can you say “chip on shoulder”?
Speaking of the journal
This is a quote from volume 1:
“There is now clear evidence that virtual reality can greatly enhance academic performance and educational attainment for students in both academic and higher education institutions” (Rephrased via Microsoft AI).
This sentence came from the end of a literature review section, which in fact, did NOT make this particular statement CLEAR with EVIDENCE.
Hello? Editors? A good editor would catch a claim like that NOT being substantiated in writing. You do plan to have editors in your edited journal, right?
But wait there’s more
No need to wait to read articles that contain this like of non-editing! You can just read a special issue coming out next year that is dedicated to, ahem, utilization of XR. Membership in the parent organization is US$150/year.
JAID special issue, sponsorted by AECT ($150/year membership):
Journal of Applied Instructional Design (JAID) Special Issue: Designing Extended Reality (XR) for Authentic Learning
Watch how the highlights are nearly all the same concept:
For this special issue, we are interested in presenting current research in applied instructional design methods for utilizing VR, AR, MR, and other immersive technologies to foster authentic learning experiences. We are inviting articles that will provide readers with practical ideas, strategies, methods, and techniques on topics related to designing, implementing, and evaluating instruction using XR for authentic learning experiences. Furthermore, we seek contributions that provide evidence about the efficacy of XR technologies, including the challenges encountered during their application in authentic settings. The articles should inform the study and practice of immersive learning in preschool, K-12, higher education, or work-based contexts. We invite scholar-practitioner perspectives as a means of disseminating and developing new ideas in instructional design. We aim to share expertise, success stories, and lessons learned from failure.
Everything old is new again
Oh and do you think the PwC thing is old news?
5 days ago on LinkedIn:
and here is the luscious “4 times” quote! (If you’ve been reading along, you know this is the key phrase to look for.)
And there there was this comment, saying “That study is gold”
It’s a report. It’s not research. It’s marketing. Say it with me “MAR-KET-TING”
And the commenter is using it for their dissertation on “the potential impact of IVR learning platforms on teaching presence”?
The PwC report did not measure presence, in any of the academically accepted ways, nor any of the man-on-the street ways. The word presence is in the report zero times.
Summary
Falling into the trap of thinking that just because it is published means that it’s fact-checked is false.
Most of the volunteer reviewing jobs I’ve been on contain 2 reviewers and 1 editor. Rarely do I ever run into anyone else with an educational psychology research background that knows about research models that do not stand up to publishing scrutiny (methods like comparing non-comparable instructional methods or exposing learners to novelty effect). I know a source that ran a 91-93% acceptance rate on articles. Owch! That’s the “write your name at the top of the paper and you get an A” publication standard. Cringe!
A person’s biases show up in their writing and editing– this happens to me just the same— no stones being thrown in glass houses here.
But there has been an undercurrent that I’ve detected running for the past 3 years:
Most folks are generally skeptical about learning in VR. It looks like a game.
Pro-VR people realize that “published research” is a way of adding validity & gravitas to their pro-VR stance.
Pro-VR people have been slipping pro-VR pieces of research into low publication standards sources and getting their overblown and hype statements like “staff learn 4x faster” flown right under radars.
Pro-VR people sit back and say “The research proves it! Come and buy some VR for education!”
This all happened in the past 3 weeks. August…August of 2023. Can you see way this Seeking Integrity series must continue?
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Happy Day 10 of the 12 Days of Christmas! You’re
probably getting tired of this by now, aren’t you? But we are almost to
the end!
For today, my favorite
example of XR-for-education is back to a concept– NOT a specific
platform, app, or game. The concept is sandboxes.
No,
these are not virtual boxes on the ground filled with sand. These are
locations in virtual reality where users are endowed as creators.
Virtual reality needs these spaces. I’m reminded of the name of one of
my favorite Facebook groups, I Require Art. I feel like that name needs a
second clause “like I need air.” Virtual reality needs places where
users of any kind can experiment.
I’m
going to name 2 platforms because they meet this standard: Upon entry,
users are endowed as creators. Of course, it often matters where you are
standing. You can’t just create anywhere and everywhere. You must have
wisdom about this.
When I first
described Second Life to my best educational psychology friend and said
“All users are endowed as creators”, he quipped back “Oh, you all can
have God complexes!” God, I loved working with that guy. He both kept me
grounded and pointed to the stars.
But,
yes, users can have God complexes. Or to put it more finely, users can
explore their desires to create, to shape their world, to build, to
paint, to sculpt, to cook, or do all kinds of creative things that
humans have been doing for millennia.
I
used to have a tiny patch of ground in Second Life, thanks to a grant
to educators via Montclair State University in New Jersey. I could
build whatever I wanted (that was free b/c I was cheap). I set up a
free pavilion, campfire, and space-pod office where-in I placed a
Tiffany lamp and tiny velociraptor, as one would do. It wasn’t much,
but it was my space.
I found that this location (https://lnkd.in/ek8h-22F) does
a good job of explaining a virtual sandbox. I don’t know them, but they
show the connection between space available, what you can do (rules),
and technical specifications (prim/polygon or memory sizes).