Penn State’s new Center for Immersive Experiences makes dreams a virtual reality
Have you ever dreamed of traveling to a remote, ancient village in Europe, but never had the time or money? Have you ever wondered what it would be like to perform lung surgery without ever setting foot in a hospital?
With Penn State’s new Center for Immersive Experiences, those experiences are becoming a virtual reality for students and faculty of all disciplines.
Alex Klippel directs the center, located in Pattee Library, which staffs a team of nine developers and five-10 student support workers. Together, they provide technology and learning tools to experience and create virtual reality, augmented reality and 360-degree video.
“The idea of the center is that it is really the go-to place for everything that has to do with immersive (technologies) and that we may or may not do ourselves but that we ideally be aware of,” he said.
“This centralized hub will provide a physical space, research support and technologies for the entire university,” said Jennifer Sparrow, associate vice president for Teaching and Learning with Technology at Penn State, which oversees the implementation of immersive technologies. “Collaborative research across disciplines is encouraged by grant funding agencies and this center will allow researchers to come together to explore the use of these technologies for teaching, research and outreach.”
CIE is the latest of several physical Penn State centers to focus on immersive technologies, but its aim is wider, to be the “visual front end for the Center for Immersive Experiences ... a joint effort by the 12 different colleges, so it’s really across the university,” Klippel said.
Immersive technologies took hold at Penn State in 2016, and are comprised of the Dreamery, the Immersive Experiences Lab (focused on 360-degree video and 3D scanning), the Earth and Mineral Sciences Library VR room and another VR room at Sidewater Commons in the Pattee Library.
The center — a bookable space for any Penn State student, faculty or staff member — has VR headsets available for use, two VR workstations equipped with computers, small group meeting rooms and a lecture space that holds 20 people for different immersive uses. On the back end, the center’s development team creates content for educational use, teaches an introductory class on how to build and use immersive technologies and conducts empirical studies on the pedagogical efficacy of those technologies.
CIE stocks the HTC Vive-I, “one of the higher end consumer level head-mount displays” that requires external sensors and has the capacity to track the user’s eye movements for a better immersive experience, Klippel said. “When I move, the virtual reality that I’m in understands that I physically moved in that space.”
The other type of VR headset available in the CIE is the Oculus Rift-S, which is another head mount headset that can either tether to the computer or be made wireless. The Oculus Rift doesn’t require external sensors because it has inside-out tracking, Klippel said, a system that uses many cameras to deliver images rapidly to the headset so it can communicate to the user where they are located in the 3D space.
Each headset has the ability to transport the user into the space they are viewing by opening up the “degrees of freedom,” which refer to the number of spatial movements an immersive technology can support. An iPhone viewfinder, for example, only has three degrees of freedom because when the user turns to the side, the image moves with them, Klippel said. But the newer VR headsets allow the viewer to move within the space they are seeing.
Because the center spans 12 colleges at Penn State and creates content for use by all Penn State Commonwealth campuses and World Campus, Klippel said, there are many different educational uses for the technology.
Sparrow said technology from the center can be “leveraged across many disciplines to enhance coursework,” including providing forestry students 360-degree video footage of a forest to assess forest health, allowing students to explore Mars’ surface through virtual reality and using augmented reality to allow viewers to examine the history of a location by holding up their cellphones.
Penn State has designated immersive technologies a strategic planning priority over the past few years. As a result, Klippel and his team have been able to bring content to various disciplines using immersive technology. They created content for and worked with introductory biology and geosciences classes to provide virtual field trips to places like Millbrook Marsh and natural gas fracking sites on Marcellus Shale formations, then studied the technology’s effects on their performance, he said.
In the center’s general education course, which is offered this spring, students have the opportunity to not only create content for virtual reality using photo and video tools, but also to create virtual worlds and augmented reality using computer programming, Klippel said.
Faculty are able to bring their classes to the center for joint viewing experiences like field trips or “walking tours” in the flexible classroom space, which can hold up to 20 people sitting still and 15 people with headsets.
Klippel, who has made a career studying the the learning benefits of teaching through immersive technology, said the center aims to create “embodied cognition,” or lifting the learning experience to an active level.
“From the learning, theoretical perspective (virtual reality) is something that has shown a lot of promise,” he said. “They’re not just looking at PowerPoint presentations, they’re actually engaged.”
Though the center is just starting out, Klippel said he and his team of developers have plenty of ideas for educational and workflow uses. The CIE is hosting a conference called Thinking Within in March and in the midst of organizing more community events like immersive technology workshops, he said.
He also wants to do more collaboration in virtual reality, to allow remote workers to access real-life project meetings virtually.
“So you can imagine that you can put on headsets, and that other people from other places might be able to join,” he said. “We currently have a project with astronomy where they design rockets that they shoot into the stratosphere to collect data ... you can basically bring (the design) into a space virtually. You can have people with you in this space but you can have people who are not physically present in this space with you.”
The Center for Immersive Experiences at Penn State is located inside the Central Atrium at Pattee Library. It is open to all Penn State staff, students and faculty on a walk-in or by appointment basis. For more information, visit immersive.psu.edu.
This story was originally published January 4, 2020 at 8:00 AM.
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