CoJMC professors Adam Wagler and Michael Hanus are working with Nebraska Educational Telecommunications (NET) on a collaborative effort to test the limits of virtual reality (VR) education.
The project will combine the research and expertise of Wagler and Hanus with the resources and production quality of NET. Together, they hope to use this initial test as a pilot to build a larger project focusing on local Nebraska history, VR and distance education.
The project will merge VR with 360-degree-video to provide a mini walking tour of Lincoln’s Centennial Mall area. The project, Wagler said, will be a first-time attempt to rapidly develop VR and integrate it with 360-degree-video.
Professor Matt Waite took part in the project by using a drone to scan the area around Centennial Mall. These scans will provide a digital 3D model of the area, which will be developed into the virtual reality aspect of the tour.
The tour will also include audio and video to educate viewers on the different historical sites around Centennial Mall. The walking tour project will serve as a pilot to assess users’ feelings about virtual reality tours and study the ways users consume the content. As part of initial tests, Hanus and Wagler tested and compared a real walking tour of the area, a 2D video tour and a 360-video.
The three conditions tested in each of the tours were presence– did the tour-goers feel like they were actually there?; recall–how much of the information from the tour was retained?; and engagement–how likely were participants to recommend the tour to a friend?
NET will lead the production aspect of the project by developing the walking tour into a user-friendly app. Chad Davis, assistant general manager of emerging media at NET, leads the team that will produce the virtual media for the shared project. NET has already recorded 360 video and audio from the Centennial Mall and will use photogrammetry to convert Matt Waite’s drone photography into a virtual space using the Unity cross-platform game engine.
“Any project where we can collaborate with CoJMC holds a lot of promise for us because of the caliber of faculty and students with whom we partner,” Davis said. “But this is an especially exciting project for NET because it allows us to extend the content on our Nebraska Virtual Capitol education website while at the same time contributing to research that will help move the VR industry forward.”
Wagler said the team will use the project to launch further grant funding and research and eventually implement similar projects into curriculum, involving CoJMC students into the process.