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Unique Spaces and Emergent Technologies from Coast to Coast
For this month’s article, we asked a few FLEXspace members to share their unique learning spaces that feature emergent technology. Below, Kathy Chiang shares the story of the UCI Esports Arena — the first of its kind on a college campus upon opening its doors in September 2016. Maya Georgieva has long championed Immersive VR at The New School in New York City. Their new XR Center has generated considerable excitement, with faculty, staff, and students hosting Friday “Meet Ups” open for anyone wishing to participate! We also learn more about the impressive IMEX Immersive Experiences Lab at Penn State from their Teaching and Learning with Technology team Crystal Ramsay, Ryan Wetzel, Bart Pursel, and Dan Getz. To browse details, images, floorplans, and more from spaces featured in this column, plus hundreds more, login to FLEXspace.org and visit the Gallery “FEATURED IN HIGHER ED AV MAGAZINE”
The Esports Arena at UC Irvine
The UCI Esports Arena was the first of its kind on a college campus upon opening its doors in September 2016. The arena is located at the heart of campus on the Student Center Terrace. Students, staff, faculty, alumni, and guests are all welcome to experience a variety of the most popular games at UCI. We provide hourly rentals and are also open for special events and tours. With the support of our sponsors, we’ve decked out the 3,500 sq. ft. space with 72 high-powered iBUYPOWER computers, Logitech gear, and comfortable gaming chairs. In addition to the PCs, we have the Console & Community Corner where our campus clubs and organizations can host events and meetings and
where we can demo virtual reality. The arena also houses our Broadcast Station to support digital content creation.
The arena was designed as part of the creation of an Esports department at UCI, housed under Student Affairs. The purpose of the facility is to provide a physical space on campus for fans of gaming and esports to congregate in addition to housing office spaces for program staff and serving as the practice space for scholarship players. The computers, due to their high-end specifications, can also prove useful for a variety of academic courses and research projects. For example, over two years, the Neurobiology department from the School of Biological Sciences conducted studies in the arena prior to opening hours, using Minecraft to study the effects of gaming on the hippocampus and short-term memory.
Beyond providing a home for gamers on campus, the arena is another way for the Esports program to directly address problematic trends and behaviors often attributed to video games. Many students were already gaming elsewhere, using their own machines in apartments or campus dormitories. The arena promotes a more social and open environment. Rules upheld by program staff and programming around social justice issues foster open dialogue, encouraging UCI students to serve as role models in their own online spaces.
Implementation
UCI Esports worked closely with the Student Center’s facilities team and the Office of Information Technology to ensure that power and networking needs unique to gaming could be met. In addition to adding more ports, we had to come up with creative solutions to mitigate latency issues less noticeable in the usual internet use cases around campus. Eventually, it was decided to prepare a separate network for Esports that would be situated outside some of the usual firewalls. Specific connections were then whitelisted through trial and error. Some games and game launchers also require administrative
privileges, which have typically not been allowed for computers available to students or the public for security reasons. OIT was able to test and verify that the GUI replacement and time/application management software used in the arena employed many additional safety precautions to prevent unwanted access to system files and the Esports network.
Maintaining the 72 machines provided another challenge, particularly as games are often patched weekly or even more frequently to fix urgent problems. Many games also require faster disk drives to improve performance in addition to a significant amount of storage space. To solve these issues, OIT approved a new diskless boot system and helped install two servers in the arena to store the master image. This also mitigated security concerns, as the public PCs would be wiped clean upon shutdown and acquire a fresh image on boot.
COVID-19 Impact & Adjustments
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the arena closed in March 2020 and is aiming for a reopening in Fall 2021. The facility’s maximum occupancy will be adjusted and monitored. Our PC stations will be significantly de-densified to accommodate new health protocols and recommendations – in our current plans, the number of computers may be reduced to about 24. All equipment and accessories will be sanitized between visits using pick-up and drop-off stations, and we will follow all additional cleaning and operational procedures for campus safety. Depending on guidance, we may choose to reopen the arena only to on-campus personnel until it is safe to allow outside visitors.
(Editor’s Note: As an aside, apparently the AP style guide has settled on the term “esports” without hyphens or capitals, and we’ll always defer to campus branding of their spaces.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5W_Jq_9LAY
Motion Capture Studio at The New School
Spaces Where We Create The Future of Design and Storytelling
The Motion Capture Studio at The New School is one of the campus spaces where at first sight it may not seem obvious that it’s a focal point for creativity. The Studio is a new space that bridges emerging technologies with immersive storytelling, production, and performance. In this seemingly empty space with no furniture, it is the digital worlds rather than the interior design or physical setting that makes things happen. The space evokes thoughts of Star Trek’s Holodeck, an empty room that only comes to life when rendered through the digital lens. Students come to the studio to capture movement, create holograms and explore creative opportunities.
On the ground floor of the Making Center at the Sheila Johnson Design Center, the studio is part of a network of studios and labs available to the Parsons School of Design students. With its 26,000 square-foot spacious open floor plan and studios, the Making Center offers students from the wide range of Parson’s programs the opportunity to explore cutting-edge and traditional making tools together from a ceramics and woodshop to 3D printing and motion capture studio. The Center is located on three floors of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center with ample natural light, and where appropriate, stunning views of a bustling Fifth Avenue in the heart of New York City. Parsons students come to the Making Center to prototype, make and experience old and emerging technologies.
The Motion Capture Studio
While the Motion Captures Studio may look unassuming when you first walk in the door, you quickly learn what this new stage can do. Motion Capture Studios are recent and still rare phenomena on college campuses; they are spurred by the current developments in virtual and augmented reality and immersive media. The New School opened the Motion Capture Studio in 2017 to support a rapidly growing group of faculty and students interested in exploring coursework, production, and research. The main driver is to give students the opportunity to reimagine and create the future of design, fashion, games, and virtual worlds. This studio serves students across programs, including those in the Immersive Storytelling minor, BFA Illustration, Design and Technology programs, and Interactive Design and Media and Performance.
Motion Capture (or often referred to as “mocap” for short), is a technology that brings sensors, cameras, and accessories together. To capture motion, students wear a suit of sensors placed all over their body, and in some cases – faces. The sensors track and record their movements, allowing them to be mapped on a computer screen in real time as a virtual ‘skeleton’. This translates the movements of an actor’s face and body to a digital character. If you’ve watched an animated movie or played a video game in the past few years, chances are you’ve seen mocap in action.
The studio is equipped with an OptiTrack mocap system and a retractable 12′ wide seamless background holder. The studio allows for a range of digital production including virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, video game design, digital animation, data visualization, and live performance. Additionally, the studio serves courses in photography and dynamic projection mapping. Students are able to bring light kits and projectors into the space when necessary. Courses across these disciplines take place in the studio. Student designers, dancers, actors, and musicians across The New School come to the studio to perform, create, capture and explore new research opportunities.
Support
When it is not scheduled for courses, students can book time in the studio on their own. The Making Center staff provide quick orientation sessions on the technology and software tool sets within the studio. A successfully completed orientation is necessary in order for students to be eligible to reserve the space. Students rent a custom black suit with trackers which enables the cameras to track their movement. The need to have students assist with running the equipment encourages them to collaborate in small groups.
The Future of Immersive Spaces
As students return to campus, the Motion Capture studio will have new protocols following the University’s policies for equipment and hygiene. The motion capture suits and trackers will be sanitized following each use and students will follow appropriate social distancing requirements for the space. The University will also ensure that there is proper ventilation. A working group on campus is currently drafting and reviewing these protocols.
Motion tracking studios present incredible opportunities for saving time, travel, production cost, and resources within the entertainment industry. Taking it a step further, digital humans and motion capture could enable fully remote production in design, fashion, theater, and other fields. As Motion Capture technology continues to evolve and become mobile it becomes possible to bring these technologies to any learning and performing spaces. It merges the physicality of human beings with the immersion of virtual worlds. With the growing interest in programs, research, and the advancement in XR, we will continue to work towards spaces for immersive simulations and theater that will bring us ever closer to the Holodeck.
The IMEX Lab at Penn State
The Immersive Experiences Lab, or IMEX Lab, at Penn State was designed specifically to support immersive experiences. It not only provides a physical space but also offers a wide range of resources for students and faculty. Going beyond an isolated room with one workstation, the IMEX Lab allows people to engage in immersive experiences with others, even if only one person at a time is wearing a headset.
Design
The signature design feature of the IMEX Lab is the pinwheel theatre: a pinwheel-shaped space that creates six “wedges,” each with a table and a multi-pivot chair for maximum user mobility. We characterize the experience students can have in the IMEX Lab as akin to that of being on safari in a Jeep: everyone has their own headset and can look around, while a facilitator guides where they look in VR to make sure the important content is viewed.
This design allows for multi-user, synchronous experiences while providing a measure of physical and psychological safety and comfort. Moving around in virtual space often means also moving around in physical space. While a headset opens up a seemingly limitless virtual world, it simultaneously blindfolds the user to their physical space. Multiple people wearing headsets tend to move around and bump into one another. Wedges create defined spaces for individual experiences.
This design also provides a space for students to feel comfortable and have some privacy. Not being able to see or hear their physical surroundings can be quite disorienting and make them feel very vulnerable, especially when there are multiple students in the space. The pinwheel configuration allows students to focus on the content and not on where other people are, or are not, in the space.
Support
The IMEX Lab is an extension of the Penn State Media Commons, part of Teaching and Learning with Technology. The Media Commons has a long track record of taking innovation to scale with a unique service model that pairs technology with experts, and instructional designers who can help faculty and students leverage the technology in meaningful ways. Even if a faculty member has never put on a headset, Media Commons staff can work with her to identify if, and how, VR might play a role in helping to achieve her learning objectives for a course. Through web resources and 1-on-1 consultations, instructors get assistance imagining and designing VR assignments and students get help completing them.
Staff partner with faculty to make sure content offered to students through the IMEX Lab is relevant and useful to their courses. To that end, we have built out the online Experience Catalogue to capture faculty requests and recommendations of immersive content. Good immersive content tends to be found within walled gardens of immersive publishers and it’s not easy to search and find relevant material – the IMEX Lab’s Experience Catalogue provides a platform for faculty to find new course-related content and contribute to the growing higher ed immersive community.
Points of Pride
For many of our students, we are providing their very first fully immersive VR experience, something they are likely to remember for a long time. Up until now, VR labs tended to look like regular computer labs – rows of desks with computers on them and headsets tethered to the computers. We wanted to free up the space and remove the tethers as much as possible, while still providing a safe and comfortable experience space for students to truly immerse themselves in the content. More importantly, we want to demonstrate that XR is not just fun and games; it is a powerful tool to explore everything from STEM-driven engineering content to challenging emotional concepts, such as empathy and embodiment.
Many students are still experiencing immersive or VR content for the first time. Having access to this technology and content is often described as “mind-blowing” by students – especially students from disciplines that are not typically associated with emerging technology like this.
The College of Agricultural Sciences – at first an unlikely physical home to the IMEX Lab – has become one of its strongest users with faculty from Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education, Plant Science, Spanish in Agriculture, and Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences. Recent projects are creating immersive on-the-farm and wildlife experiences for students in the College.
What’s next
The use of the online version of the IMEX Lab including the Experience Catalogue has not only remained strong during hybrid/remote learning but has also grown in key areas like the [IMEX]cursions that helped faculty include facsimiles of study abroad travel in their courses over the past year.
The future of the IMEX Lab is empowering students and faculty of all disciplines and technology backgrounds to create compelling content in immersive spaces, from 360° video to virtual reality and onward to augmented reality. We continue to explore technology advancements in this space and explore new avenues of content creation including 3D scanners, 3D modeling, 3D 180° cameras, spatial audio, and more.
Want to contribute to the FLEXspace Community?
The growing FLEXspace community is always looking for the latest examples of innovative and effective learning spaces. Please share your campus spaces by logging into FLEXspace.org, and contact Rebecca or Lisa if you would like to be featured in an upcoming issue of Higher Ed AV magazine.
BIOS
KATHY CHIANG
Assistant Director of UCI Esports
UC Irvine
Kathy Chiang is the Assistant Director of UCI Esports. She manages the arena, oversees program staff, and leads key initiatives including training programs, outreach, summer camps, and operations for the UCI Esports Conference.
MAYA GEORGIEVA
Director of Education Futures and The XReality Center
The New School
Maya Georgieva is the Director of Education Futures and The XReality Center at The New School and provides strategic leadership in creating a culture and capacity for innovative design with emerging technologies, including XR and AI.
The Penn State TLT Team represented here are:
CRYSTAL RAMSAY
Assistant Director, Teaching and Learning with Technology Innovation
Penn State
BART PURSEL
Director of Innovation
Penn State
RYAN WETZEL
Manager of Media/Maker Commons, and IMEX Lab
Penn State
DAN GETZ
Immersive Experiences Consultant at University Park
Penn State
The FLEXspace Team
LISA STEPHENS, Ph.D.
Assistant Dean, Digital & Online Education
School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, The University at Buffalo
Project Director, FLEXspace.org
Lisa serves as Assistant Dean at the University at Buffalo School of Engineering and Applied Sciences leading the Office of Digital & Online Education, and also serves as Senior Strategist for Academic Innovation in the Office of the SUNY Provost. She enjoys an appointment in the UB Department of Communication as an Adjunct Associate Professor. Her SUNY portfolio includes leadership of FLEXspace.org™ and serves as the SUNY Partner Manager for Coursera.
REBECCA V. FRAZEE, EdD
Faculty, Learning Design & Technology Program
San Diego State University
Associate Director, FLEXspace.org
Rebecca teaches in the Learning Design and Technology program at San Diego State University and is the FLEXspace.org Manager. She enjoys experimenting with new technology tools and techniques to support active learning and team collaboration in higher ed and the workplace. Rebecca is a singer and songwriter and has been having fun with asynchronous ‘socially distanced’ recording projects this year. Contact Rebecca at rfrazee@sdsu.edu, and Twitter at @rebeccafrazee.
The Flexible Learning Environments eXchange (FLEXspace.org) is an award winning community and open digital repository for higher ed that houses a growing collection of user-contributed content “by campuses for campuses,” with detailed examples of formal and informal learning spaces ranging from multimedia studios, makerspaces, computer labs, hybrid/flexible classrooms, and huddle spaces to large exhibit spaces, simulation labs and renovated lecture halls. FLEXspace was launched in 2012 as a collaboration between SUNY, the CSU Cal State University system, and Foothill-DeAnza Community College District and has since grown to include over 5000 members from 1400 campuses around the world, with PennState joining the partnership in 2019. FLEXspace won the Campus Technology Innovators Award in 2016, and the California Higher Education (CHEC) Collaborative Conference Focus on Efficiency Award in 2018.
FLEXspace users include practitioners, experts and decision makers in higher education, K-12, libraries, and museums who are focused on campus planning and facilities, learning technology, A/V systems integration, instructional design, teaching, and research. The FLEXspace portal provides a sophisticated suite of features that enables users to document and showcase their own campus learning spaces, share research, best practices and tools for planning,