In this week’s episode, we interview Jaime Donnally, who is a passionate technology enthusiast who began her career as a math teacher, later moving into instructional technology. She began the #ARVRinEDU group and started a weekly twitter chat as part of her way to build community and collaborate with educators around the world using augmented and virtual reality in the classroom. She also provides professional staff development and training on immersive technology as an edtech consultant.
More recently she just published her first book, Learning Transported, which supports her goal of providing introductory resources for teachers. The book provides practical uses of augmented and virtual reality in the classroom. In this episode, speak with Jaime and learn a little more about where the book idea came from. We also learn about some of Jaime’s plans for ISTE, the International Society for Technology in Education conference, which is happening in Chicago on June 24-27th. Check out all of the ISTE Virtual Reality sessions here! Check out all of the ISTE Augmented Reality sessions here!
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Games. I’ve always enjoyed the experience of games. I enjoyed the social experience playing games with family members growing up. I enjoyed sports growing up and the friendly competition to keep you motivated. Even more recently, I’ve enjoyed playing sports with friends, such as racquetball or basketball. When I’m playing sports with friends I forget about the workout, and just focus on the game. Experiencing the game itself can keep me motivated and without thinking about it I also get a great workout.
Increasingly, games are finding their way into everyday life. Many people are wearing fitbits and other fitness trackers, trying to reach their 10,000 steps a day. Nintendo’s Wii Fit has been a popular video game system since 2007, with the goal of allowing people to play video games while getting a workout. It’s even being used in some school physical education classes. Fitness watches, tracking your running, walking, heart rate all add to the collection of data about our workouts that can help to gamify your personal data. Some people call it the quantified self movement, as we try to beat our own and our friends’ high scores and try to keep streaks going through viewing our own data, charts, and graphs. Gamified elements in these experiences can prove to be motivating. It’s only natural that as virtual reality gains in popularity, this new experience medium is being reimagined for fitness experiences. In this week’s podcast, the Virtual Reality Podcast team tries to convince James why he needs to start to look into virtual reality for fitness. We discuss different apps and hardware utilizing virtual reality for fitness, as we try to convince him to start using them for motivation towards his fitness goals. Will we convince him to begin a virtual reality workout routine? Check out the episode to find out! Here are some of the platforms discussed in the episode. Beat Saber BoxVR Sound Boxing VirZOOM
Cardboard & cell phones, tethered headsets with USBs and HDMI cables. All promises of access to a powerful technology: virtual reality. When thinking about this promise, it was difficult to not get excited. It was also difficult to put into words what the experience was like or how it affected me on such a fundamental level of humanity. Thanks to friends, I was reminded of a movie my family, especially my daughter, thoroughly enjoyed...The Greatest Showman. What an awesome story. But, the lines that struck me most in the movie resonated in the same way that experience with modern virtual reality did. The lines are from a song, A Million Dreams…in fact, they are the opening lines.
“ I close my eyes and I can see
The world that's waiting up for me That I call my own Through the dark, through the door Through where no one's been before But it feels like home”
VR feels very much the same to me, a world I can call my own…a place no one has been before, but feels like home. Of course, equity in access to this technology has not been that easy. Cardboard brought it more to the masses, but only the masses with a capable smart phone. And those in education began the dance of finding phones that would work while still at a small price point. We became familiar with terms like pyrometer and accelerometer as we bought prepaid and unlocked Android phones that had mixed results for VR use. The cost aside, the smartphone didn’t give the greatest experience either. Low resolution and shoddy experiences would create another issue in what would be called virtual reality sickness. Many factors lead to this ache outside of the quality of experience, but it does play a large role in that disoriented sick feeling
So what about today? Over a year ago, you could hear educators proclaiming one possible solution, and it was so clear to those in education what needed to be done. Cell phones were becoming more powerful, but increasingly expensive for the simple fact it connected to a cellular service provider…something not really needed in a VR experience. What about a self contained device that didn’t require inserting a cellphone into a headset? A standalone vr experience that would have the strength of the most powerful cellphones, but not the expense of a cellular enabled unit. And maybe this standalone could even rival the tethered units someday. Shortly after this grassroots idea spread, Google announced their plans to develop a standalone VR device. They were not the only ones to come forward with such an idea. PICO released their own three degrees of freedom headset, the Goblin and Oculus announced they too would develop a standalone unit called Oculus Go. What do these lower cost standalone units mean for education, business, humanity? It means more diverse peoples can to experience virtual reality as I did.
“ I close my eyes and I can see
The world that's waiting up for me That I call my own Through the dark, through the door Through where no one's been before But it feels like home”
After our four part series on RP1, we thought it would be good to discuss what the VR podcast is and how it can be an awesome place of sharing and spreading ideas. But I do want to shout out to all those who have been so encouraging and provided feedback for our project we call The Virtual Reality Podcast. We take feedback to heart and try to improve with each episode based on your comments…so keep them coming!
First, we are planning multiple ways for you to get information you want about immersion technology. Of course, this podcast is the home base, but we also have others. Right now, we have a blog that accompanies every episode from RP1 and we will continue that tradition with our next podcast. We DO special event where we not only capture audio, but video. These can be seen primarily on our youtube channel. We also do livestream on FB…just look for @thevirtualrealitypodcast. In fact, you will find a video we just did with the four of us in Oculus Rooms using the new Oculus Go on YouTube that we recorded using FB livestream. And then we have our website, thevirtualrealitytpodcast.com. It has all this information, plus embedded audio from the latest podcast, the blog, podcast venues you can find us on, like iTunes, Google Play, Anchor, Stitcher, and a host of others. If you have a favorite podcast application and we aren’t on it, DM us on Twitter or message us on FB…we will get our content on those platforms! We also have other social media we are slowly venturing into, such as Instagram and LinkedIn. The links to those can be found on our website. Another area of our website that we are getting closer to launching is our resources area. This will be chopped full of information on VR, AR, MR, AI, 3D, and anything else immersion tech. We will also have ideas for application in education and in business…and probably other enterprise solutions as well. If you would like to blog on our site or add a resource, let us know! We love highlighting what others are doing in immersion tech…mainly because we are complete geeks when it comes to this tech. But moving beyond the ways we will make our content available, we want to engage with the community. We are building ways for this to happen and will be unveiling more in the coming months. For instance, we use the commonly used #vrpodcast hashtag to allow you to ask questions or post ideas on Twitter. We aren’t the only ones to use this hashtag, so other vr podcasters can also see your questions, comments, or ideas. This is what we want. We want to engage all of our community, including our brothers and sisters using like hashtags, such as #vrpodcast. Two groups that use this hashtag are VRHounds, I encourage you to check them out on YouTube by searching VR Hounds…they livestream under multiple usernames of the different hosts, and the very popular Voices of VR, which you can find on iTunes or at their website, voicesofvr.com. And this is just the first way we are engaging our community. We just recently got back from ImmersED 2018 in Marian Del Ray, California where we sat down with vendors, developers, school administrators, VR legends, and other immersion tech enthusiasts to share their story and pick their brain on immersion technology. One video is up already with guest Michael Fricano of I’olani School in Hawaii. Make sure to check out that vid on our channel and also Michael by going to edtechnocation.com or on twitter @edtechnocation. We will be posting more videos from ImmersED over the next few weeks, so be sure to subscribe on youtube to get updates. One of the beautiful things about Youtube is commenting, so please leave comments on the video, immersion tech, or about the virtual reality podcast. We are experimenting with interactive questions on our medium as well, so make sure to check out that Oculus Go video. One thing I forgot to mention about that particular video is what we shared. We each looked at an app we thought could have some educational implications. What was so awesome was Rooms actually ended up being the most impactful…and we didn’t realize it til we were in it. So I encourage you to get your hands on an Oculus Go to try out Rooms. If you do, and you try other apps, hit us up on social media with the #vrpodcast hashtag to share your experience. If you want to connect with us in person, we have some events coming up, with the biggest being ISTE from June 24th through the 27th. Thats a Sunday through Wednesday, but a lot of people start arriving on Saturday. I know I will, and I think Amanda Fox and Steven Sato will be coming in that Saturday as well. And I think Alex Chaucer is trying to work out the timing to also be in attendance. We are going to be capturing audio and video…and having playground time with some awesome tech. Stay tuned for times and locations for that. Also, a couple of us are presenting at ISTE, so come on by and connect with us there. Make sure to mention the podcast so we can recognize ya. I think there are other events in between now and ISTE, so make sure to follow us and the #vrpodcast hashtag to see when and where. And all of this is to showcase the awesome things happening in immersion tech. Whether you are a educator, student, administrator, sales rep, or a CEO, we want you to share your story and thoughts on immersion tech. Make sure to reach out if you want to come on the podcast, do a video with us, or just talk shop. We love connecting with others that have the same passion for technology. As for what comes next, get ready for some cool series of episodes on the VR podcast, on location videos, and even video stream from inside virtual reality. We are so excited to share our passion and cannot wait to connect with all of you!
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