VR in the School Library?
VR in the School Library?
~contributed by Marc Crompton St. George's Senior School
Technologies come and go. Some stick around like the eBook and AudioBooks seem to, and others, like filmstrips, eventually go the way of the Dodo bird. What is hard is figuring out which technologies have legs and are going to have something to offer our collections and readers over the long-term. One technology I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is Virtual Reality(VR). VR is not new new. It’s been around in various forms for a few years, but not until recently have I started to wonder if there are opportunities that aren’t addressed in other ways that would make sense standing next to our books, videos, and databases.
Let’s start by defining VR and looking at how content is delivered in this realm. VR is distinct from AR (Augmented Reality) in that VR is a medium that separates the user from their surrounding environment both visually and, perhaps, aurally. AR uses a camera to situate VR elements in your surrounding environment or to identify elements of your real environment and provide information about them. For example, a VR experience might involve you being transported to the International Space Station (ISS) where you float about on the station and interact with that environment. There is no connection to your real surrounding environment (outside of maybe seeing your house pass by from the window of the ISS). You might be wearing noise-cancelling headphones to cut you off sonically from those in your environment talking about how weird you look moving around in something that they can’t see! In an AR application, you might simulate putting the Rosetta Stone on your living room coffee table so that you can walk around it and view it from different angles. Here, you are merging your real environment with other objects or information. The Google Glass product that proposed to project information about your environment on the inside of your glasses is another example of AR.
So why VR in a library? VR has the ability to let the user have an experience that they would not otherwise be able to have in a way that feels very much like being somewhere that one could not otherwise be. The International Space Station example is explored by at least two content developers currently. National Geographic has a video with footage from the ISS that makes one feel very much like they are floating at near-0 gravity through the habitat. Not only is the footage taking us somewhere that we would otherwise not be able to go, it is altering our perception of our environment to make us feel like we are really there. Magnopus, another VR developer, has an experience that simulates being in the ISS in their app, Mission:ISS. While the imagery is less realistic than the National Geographic film footage, the ability to interact with the environment is much stronger. You can float through the station under your own control (not as easy as it sounds), click on things to get explanations of the objects in the environment, and even conduct “simple” missions such as docking a supply module and going for a space walk.
While leaving Earth’s surface is certainly going places that most humans currently don’t go, there are many other experiences on Earth that are explored quite effectively through VR. BBC, Al Jazeera, the Economist, and National Geographic all produce content in VR that situates the user directly in the environment that is being explored. I have been to the North Pole with Al Gore to look at polar ice cap melt. I have visited a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh. I have been taken on a tour of a village in Africa to explore how a factory has rendered the local water supply completely undrinkable. While all of these stories have been told many times via traditional 2D media, there is something about being in a VR environment that makes one feel much more connected to the place and people. There is also plenty of animated and digitally created content that tells stories of historical and cultural relevance such as the BBC’s Nothing to be Written exploring the letters written home in WWI, and Sesqui VR’s Meridian telling stories of and by Canadian Indigenous artists and musicians.
I could go on quite some time about the content that is emerging for this medium, but why now? What has changed that makes VR something worth exploring in our current school library collections? Of course, technology is always getting better and cheaper, but what has shifted my thinking is the release of the Oculus Go by Facebook and Samsung. Prior to the release of the Oculus Go, the most common ways of delivering VR content was the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive. Both of these devices required a dedicated grid that required a few cubic feet of space to set up and required a stand alone computer in addition to the viewer itself. You would need to spend a couple of thousand dollars for a system that was, for all intents and purposes, limited to being used in a specific physical space. Along comes the Oculus Go which is a completely independent system costing about $350CAD for the high end viewer (more memory). While there are differences between the Go and the Rift in the way that one can interact with it (one can move around in virtual space in a Rift or Vive where the environment moves around you in a Go), the experience is nearly as effective at less than a quarter of the cost. HTC has announced that they are also releasing a stand alone VR viewer which should be better than the Go in that it is much closer to the Vive and Rift experience, but no word on price or release date as of yet.
It is entirely feasible that a library could have one or more Oculus Gos available for borrowing at the current price point. They could be loaded with content the way one administers a Kindle and loaned out or available for use in the Learning Commons space. There would be cataloguing and other administration issues, but nothing more complex than what we have dealt with regarding iPads, Kindles, or other devices which content is loaded.
The biggest issue from an educational perspective that I see is that VR technology is highly individual in nature. Because one is manipulating their own environment to some extent, you can’t put a class down in front of a VR movie and expect them to share the same experience. This is good and bad. Facebook, being Facebook, has developed a number of social apps that work with the Go, but I have yet to see anything that allows students to connect well for educational purposes around a subject. I’m sure that that is coming. But maybe this is the argument for putting these devices in our libraries. No two people read the same book, at the same speed and get the same thing out of the experience. Maybe VR documentaries and stories are more like books than movies are in this respect.
Thanks for reading. Please feel free to comment. But for the time being, I’m jacking back into the Matrix...
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