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We are transitioning from a world of passive technology to a world full of active learning experiences.

There is a wealth of opportunity for students to become creators of content, as opposed to simply consumers of content by using just a desktop, a laptop, or a powerful handheld device. The AR/VR industry continues to grow in its use and adoption in the way we work, socialize, learn, and entertain ourselves. Many AR/VR experiences pre-pandemic rested largely on the work of developers releasing apps, or one-off experiences that provide a limited glimpse into the learning potential.

Advances in these technologies are accelerating at a rapid pace, and remote learning has only hastened that process; open source developments in web technologies are now enabling any user to create their own virtual worlds and share those experiences with others. We have the opportunity to introduce these development platforms to students.

We’ve asked Anthony White, an educator in the remote island Kodiak, Alaska to share more about how he has built virtual worlds and experiences with his students.

How did you become involved with/interested in AR/VR technology?

As an educational technologist, I have helped teachers integrate technology into their practice, and have tested a wide assortment of effective tools for my own teaching purposes. But while I recognize that video technology can serve as a powerful medium for teaching and learning, I always felt like something was missing; I would teach on one side of the screen, while students passively received the signal on the other side. Even though I used computers in the classroom, many of the experiences were supplemental to a more traditional method of instruction. Despite working as an educational technologist, I had never before worked with 3D media and design.

Then the pandemic hit. While we learned to navigate this new reality, I embarked on a search for something that would truly capture my students’ interest, keep them engaged, and help enable a collaborative learning environment. In March of 2020 I discovered Hubs by Mozilla, a VR chat room designed for every device and browser. Hubs is an open source project that explores how communication in mixed reality can come to life.

Painting in VR with OpenBrush

I knew this was the tool that would allow me and my students to take learning to the next level in the Digital Age, from scrolling for information to actually interacting with information. Dr. Keith Chan, anthropology instructor at San Diego community colleges, created an immersive learning environment that perfectly demonstrates this shift from searching to interacting with information.

How have you implemented Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality in your classroom?

We are in new territory in education, especially for secondary schools. My students have created a wide variety of immersive experiences, such as augmented reality experiences using the Reality Composer app for OS/iOS. My students have also created immersive VR experiences with A-Frame, a web framework for building virtual reality experiences. With this language and a brief primer on the structure of HTML, students can easily make WebVR with HTML and Entity-Components.

Students using FrameVR as a digital escape room

I also teach a course that focuses on workforce & internship readiness, helping prepare students for life after high school. For one project I helped students utilize Mozilla Hubs to act as avatars in a scenario where they could practice conflict resolution strategies in a safe and virtual environment. The results were astounding as some students chose to use Oculus Virtual Reality headsets to embody their persona. To see more of the amazing work our students are completing, check out this collection of students projects.

What has been the most challenging part of integrating AR/VR in your classroom?

The most challenging part in all of this is the fact that I am learning right along with the students. Though I would consider myself fairly adept at utilizing technology for teaching and learning, my knowledge in the syntax and structure of many of the languages that are the foundation of these experiences is lacking. I think it’s important that students know I do not have all the answers, but Github, YouTube videos, and documentation websites do. We learn, create novel representations of learning, and shape the future of education together.

Student testing out their AR creation

What’s next for your school and AR/VR implementation?

Next year I am very excited to offer a year-long course for Kodiak High School students titled “Interactive Media” in a new classroom called the “Innovative Media Lab.” Students will have access to a wide variety of new technologies and programs that will allow them to create virtual experiences spanning a variety of purposes. We will be helping to prepare students for a future that is deeply immersed in technology and interactivity.

In the fall we will also be hosting an international hackathon that provides a space for teachers and students to create immersive learning experiences that will be linked on a website called the Eduverse. The Eduverse is an amelioration of the metaverse, a collective virtual shared space, but specific to education. Any and all learners will be able to freely access these learning experiences as well as learn how to make their own and contribute to a growing collection of innovative educational technology.

Printing custom 3D game assets

What advice do you have for other educators who might be interested in AR/VR technology for their classrooms?

We are at the brink of something extremely exciting and new in Education Technology (EdTech), and to be honest there isn’t a whole lot out there (yet) in regards to student-generated augmented and virtual reality experiences. However, the tools exist and are in a constant state of development, many of which are open source and free to use. Take the time to learn with the students, allow for mistakes, celebrate the achievements and share them with the world.

A-Frame is a great entry point for many educators and students interested in building immersive environments. WebVR platforms such as FrameVR and Hubs by Mozilla are fantastic entry points for any learner and allow you to quickly create unique (and free) experiences. If you teach computer science classes, introduce your students to frameworks such as three.js or babylon.js. For instructors of game development, Unity and the Unreal Engine house a wealth of tutorials on how to create VR experiences.

Sites such as BrioVR and tools such as Reality Composer for Apple OS/iOS open up a world of creative possibilities to create augmented reality experiences (keep a keen eye out on Apple as something big is coming down the road that will most likely shape the way we view and utilize AR/VR). At this critical juncture in how we use technology, it is crucial we are providing students with the tools they need to be successful in the post-digital era. Let’s build the Eduverse together!

Using Hubs to manage conflict resolution

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anthony White is an educator of over 9 years currently teaching in Kodiak, Alaska. He is an artist at heart and always leans towards the creative expression of learning. Anthony is passionate about theatre, graphic design, traditional media, music, game design, and 3D modeling, especially when all facets of art intersect with computers and technology.

As director of the very first TED-Ed VR animated short, you worked with an ace team to bring hand-drawn animation and educational content to life in a new genre: the emerging medium of 360° 2D stereoscopic VR animation. How difficult was it to pull that rabbit out of the hat?

Generally I can say that pulling together all of the various technologies and production artists to make this happen was probably THE most daunting production challenge I’ve ever encountered in my 25 years of working in animation. There is simply no “one product solution” at this point in VR’s production adolescence.

Happily, we were pretty ruthless and focused in our desire to create a VR cartoon. I’m glad we persevered.

To get from the original concept idea to a working final product required cobbling together a “tech salad” of software solutions. And to make it even more challenging, the final presentation platform — Google Cardboard video presented on YouTube — kept iterating throughout our production process. So that in itself was a moving target which made our ability to cross the finish line more precarious by the month! Happily, we were pretty ruthless and focused in our desire to create a VR cartoon. I’m glad we persevered.

When did you start working on this particular animation project with TED-Ed?

I received my first Cardboard player in my New York Times Sunday delivery in the fall of 2015. I’d been reading about the platform, but when the viewer just showed up in my living room I immediately realized that millions of NYT readers now had access to Cardboard-based content. I made a decision that morning to create cartoons for the platform!

I thought long and hard about what kinds of content would work well in the 360° VR world and pretty quickly came to the idea that a narrator-driven vehicle could work very well in a medium where the viewer can be looking at any point in the 360° sphere at any time. This is a massive challenge for traditional narrative cinema because the director is not fully in charge of choosing the audience’s focus. And though I certainly had to deal with many of the same challenges as an animation director, I knew that the inclusion of a voiceover narrator would make my job easier by directing the viewer to look for specific visuals within the world I would create.

Early concept art included this flat, panoramic painting of the inside of the cave.

Why did you suggest the topic of prehistoric cave paintings for this video?

Well, once I’d gotten the Cardboard viewer I began to gorge myself on any and all of the 360° VR content I could find. I knew that I wanted to make the piece as a hand-drawn 2D animated short. Having set that criteria, it then dawned on me that I’d be required to design, paint, and perhaps animate an entire world in not only 360 degrees horizontally, but vertically too. This type of world creation is a sort of “given” in 3D animation production. But working in 2D would require a different approach, and a new way of visualizing the experience that I hadn’t thought of before. I panicked. I wondered what I’d gotten myself into. Eventually I calmed down and realized that working inside a confined space would fit the project well and allow me to create visual “fences” beyond which the viewer wouldn’t be interested in looking. Initially I thought the subject of the piece could center around a part/system of the human body where the viewer would be inside the blurry, rose-colored walls of some organs or something. Then I hit upon the idea of a cave and it was a fairly quick leap from just any cave to a specific cave which housed prehistoric paintings. I was energized, and proposed this cave painting idea to TED-Ed, who also agreed that it was a good source of educational and visual promise.

Storyboards for the ‘Mid-Cave’ Shaman sequence.

What kind of creative challenges did you face in designing for a 360-degree visual storytelling environment?

There were a lot of technical challenges in learning about how exactly to create artwork on a flat computer monitor and have it look “right” within the 360° sphere of the cave. This took weeks and months of trial and error to come up with a system that was rock solid. By now, the technical targets will likely have iterated again and our “bullet-proof” process will need to be upgraded.

Technical issues aside, perhaps the biggest challenge was in how to present the educational highlights of the text without requiring the viewer to be looking at a certain place at a certain time. This was a huge conceptual mountain to climb. I decided that the best teaching method for this particular short would be to create a few large set pieces (inside a cave, outside overlooking a prehistoric meadow) and let the voiceover just run atop it all while the action played out beneath. Generally the “business” of the characters and situations happen in their own pacing and feel integrated with what the narrator is saying, but they are not slavishly tied to every educational point being made. I wanted to bolster the viewer’s freedom to look anywhere at any time.

Preliminary sketches for the ‘Shaman’ character.

Are there any sights, sounds, or hand-drawn scenes in this lesson that you specifically want to highlight for the TED community?

I spent a lot of time and animation effort into getting the masked Shaman to walk correctly and hop with weight and determination. I cracked open some of my favorite animation ‘how to’ books and refreshed my knowledge of the basics of character animation. I designed the Shaman’s entire entrance and trance sequence by using tiny thumbnails, then turning those thumbnails into stick figures, and finally fleshing out those stick figures into finished poses. I worked with a digital tablet and pen when doing all of the final line work for the Shaman and the entire piece. I started the process with pencils (for storyboards and thumbnail designs) but jumped to digital pen as soon as I could, to reduce having to duplicate efforts across multiple media.

As far as spatial depth goes, I’ll direct your readers to notice the layers of stereoptic layering that my production partners at Idle Hands Studios created. This tech didn’t exist “right out of the box” with any current software package. The geniuses at IH wrote some discrete code for this TED-Ed project so that when the viewer turns in any direction the layers of depth remain consistent. That sounds like it should be a straightforward feature available in any 360° VR production package. But it’s actually a huge hole in the system right now and requires individual solutions for each situation.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with readers about the experience of directing this experiment?

Only that the producers at TED-Ed have been amazingly supportive and patient with this production. They realized from the beginning that I was attempting to do something new and that really hadn’t been done before (2D hand-drawn animation in 360° VR). They were as excited as I was and they never wavered in their support even though I traversed some very stressful chasms in trying to find a production solution which would take us to a successful end.

Would you want to do more of these video productions?

We’re already talking about the next one!

How to view this TED-Ed animated 360° video

If you have access to a Google Cardboard viewer and a smart phone:

1. Open this video in the YouTube app on your phone.
2. Hit pause on the video.
3. Tap the 3 vertical dots on the top right corner of the view window. This will slide up a sub-menu where you will choose the quality setting of your video stream. Choose “2160s.” Note that if you are not streaming over Wifi, YouTube will only allow “720s” quality.
4. Tap on the “Cardboard viewer” icon on the bottom row of the video window (it looks like a mask). This will present the video full screen in prep for the Cardboard viewer.
5. The screen is now divided into 2 halves, separated by a thin white line that runs halfway up the screen. Make sure to rotate your phone so that this thin line is coming from the bottom of the screen. This ensures proper stereoscopic depth.
6. Insert your phone into the Cardboard viewer and press play. The video will begin. Enjoy!

If you do not have access to a Cardboard or smart phone:

1. You can watch on your browser. Use your mouse to drag and explore the space above, below, and behind you. Enjoy!

Art credit: Lippy/TED-Ed

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