Immersion and Interactive Environments in VR
They need to be able to chew the scenery
When I was in my early twenties, I wrote a thesis for my first master’s degree about the frontier myth in American popular culture. My research involved watching every.single.one of the Star Trek episodes. I could tell you lots of things if you get me rolling about it, but for the purpose of this post, let’s talk about William Shatner.
The man knows how to chew scenery. In theater lingo, that means extreme overacting. In fact, since I have watched every moment of Shatner’s Star Trek career, I can even tell you that he quite literally chewed the set scenery. Or at least I’m pretty sure he did.
I have a very clear memory of James T. Kirk noshing on the set of Star Trek, but I can’t find an image of it online. Which either means, a) all of the people who love to post memes and video compilations of Shatner’s overacting somehow never found it or, b) I dreamed it.
The latter is the most likely, I suppose, considering that semester I was watching Star Trek the Original Series in between reading Joseph Campbell books and trying to fit in as much World of Warcraft as possible. But feel free to help me out in the comments if you know that scene exists!
If you simply plan to point out what this says about how odd I am, keep in mind this is well-known information. 😊 I fully embrace my weird, right along with my nerdiness.
While he may or may not have physically chomped the set, Shatner certainly knew how to interact with it. He threw things, he broke computer interfaces in fits of rage, he frantically worked on fixing parts of the ship in a way that looked suspiciously like churning butter. I really want to make more jokes with that as a spin-off, but you are here for tech, not Trek (yep, couldn’t stop myself).
What does this have to do with VR?
Well, it’s a memorable way to tell you that immersion in VR requires the ability for a user to directly interact with the world around them.
All these beautiful, extremely impressive scans of environments make VR seem very exciting, but right now they don’t do much for us as educators.
I know some of you are going to point out how popular, fun, and simply amazing things like many of the immersive art experiences are and I agree with you. They provide a different sensory experience and make people engage with art in ways they couldn’t before. The same can be said for simpler 360-degree videos that can be accessed on a phone.
These have a place in higher ed, but they aren’t what I am targeting in this post. For those sorts of experiences, you can use a cellphone or simply move around a room to take part in it. You don’t need a VR headset and they are meant to be more passively consumed or only really respond to body movement to change perspective or trigger preset experience branching.
You can’t pick up a rock and throw it.
To truly use VR in ways that transform the student experience and that also justify the costs of the technology, we need students to be able to do things. We need them to build mastery and skills. If they only need to be able to see something, then we should use a technology that is cheaper and includes fewer barriers.
When you are designing VR, or picking out a VR program, keep in mind the role of immersion. To maintain immersion in VR, if you put an object in an environment, it should be something a user can interact with.
Researchers have called this “realistic dynamic interactions” and also noted that if a VR program, especially in the case where the goal is to recreate a lab environment, doesn’t have enough of them it leads to poor student learning outcomes. Let’s be real. How long would you remain interested in a digital recreation of a lab where you couldn’t touch anything?
Personally, I would want to find out the result of combining two chemicals that shouldn’t be combined. Or see what happens when I overload an electrical system. And in case you want to argue that it isn’t a reasonable use of our time to code in all these options I will ask, then what is the point?
Sure, right now we should be focused on the fundamentals and so if your VR program allows a student to realistically recreate the ‘right’ way you should practice lab safety, or some other competency, then awesome. As long as it is something they are actively engaged in and builds a skill it makes me very, very excited to see it.
But thinking beyond that, our goal should be to recreate those sorts of “what happens if I do this?” moments so we spark one of the most powerful immersive and motivating feelings of human existence: play.
Have some examples you want to share? I would love to read about them in the comments!