EducationXR is an extended reality (XR) platform that addresses creation, deployment, and distribution of immersive content to all phones, tablets, desktops, and VR headsets.

The platform comprises of three main parts:

1. A Unity package called Caffeine that allows creators to design, publish, and test their EducationXR content from the Unity editor with ease
2. Viewer applications to consume a creator’s EducationXR content on multiple platforms (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Oculus Quest, PCVR, Pico, and VisionPro)
3. A website to manage a creator’s organization, users, roles, and content.

My responsibilities as the Senior Unity Developer laid primarily in the Caffeine package and the viewer applications. Over my nearly 3 years at EducationXR, I led development on many features:

• web view integration
• single sign-on authentication
• code authentication
• account deletion
• gradual sign-on and registration
• PDF attachments
• URL attachments
• VR Passthrough
• Visual scripting node development
• material optimizer
• performance debugger
• and many more

Additionally, I collaborated closely with our development team, participated in company game jams as a form of dogfooding, contributed greatly to UI/UX overhauls, and submitted countless bug fixes.

Another use case for the CAVE is as part of our virtual production pipeline, using the Elumenati’s WorldViewer and Omnity plugin for the Unity game engine. This allows us to collaborate inside the 3D environment and demo content for clients.

A vendor and partner since 2018, the Elumenati is a design and engineering firm creating innovative solutions for immersive visualization. With nearly twenty years as leaders in the field, their mission is to develop elegant, effective systems and novel applications of immersion and interactivity, building VR domes and social, collaborative spaces for XR experiences.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has had a major effect on PK-12 classrooms, it has also affected opportunities for preservice teachers to gain practical teaching experience. Responding to this problem, School of Education faculty Meredith Park Rogers and Adam Maltese, along with Dionne Cross Francis of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an affiliate faculty member of IU, have begun work on a project with collaborators from ETS, Towson University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they will design and study an online suite of practice-based teaching activities intended to support mathematics and science preservice teachers in honing their skills for facilitating argumentation-focused discussions.

This project, funded by a grant for over $3 million from the National Science Foundation (Grant 2037983), will run from 2020-2023. ETS serves as the lead organization for the project, titled Online Practice Suite (OPS): Practice Spaces, Simulations and Virtual Reality Environments for Preservice Teachers to Learn to Facilitate Argumentation Discussions in Mathematics and Science.

The OPS consists of a coordinated set of online practice-based teaching activities that include game-based practice spaces, small-group avatar-based simulations, and a virtual reality classroom. The activities are designed to be complemented with targeted feedback and support from teacher educators.

With the COVID-19 pandemic increasingly pushing K-12 schools and universities across the nation to adopt online approaches, there is an immediate need for finding effective methods for preservice teachers to practice teaching even if traditional school-based teaching experiences are less available.

Even without pandemic-related restrictions, learning how to teach effectively demands that preservice teachers have robust, authentic and consistent opportunities to engage in the work of teaching—ideally across different contexts with diverse student populations and for varied purposes.

Over the next three years, the OPS research team will work with mathematics and science teacher educators to design, test, and refine the full suite of online practice-based teaching activities. Findings will be used to understand the mechanisms that support preservice teachers’ learning within and across the OPS activities and to document an emergent set of best practices for supporting preservice teachers’ improvement in this ambitious teaching practice over time. The OPS will be accompanied by support materials to help teacher educators use and integrate the activities into teacher education courses, including online and face-to-face learning contexts. Both elementary and middle/secondary school mathematics and science scenarios will be developed for the OPS.

The IU faculty will work with the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts (IDIA Lab) at Ball State University to develop an immersive virtual reality environment that will situate teachers in learning to navigate a whole-class discussion with students. This aspect of the OPS is referred to as the Virtual Teacher Simulator (VTS). In these simulations, preservice teachers will move beyond the one-on-one and small-group interactions of the other two OPS activities and begin to put their skills together to teach a full classroom of virtual student avatars. Each preservice teacher will have the opportunity to move around the classroom and engage with the virtual student avatars just as though they were in a real classroom. Additionally, they will receive feedback from a mathematics or science teacher educator (i.e., coach) in order to continue to improve their practice.

As Park Rogers explains, “The VTS context especially affords preservice teachers multiple opportunities to rehearse their teaching within a short time span, without disrupting learning in a real classroom, all while receiving immediate and expert feedback from specialized mathematics and science teacher educators. Furthermore, incorporating real-time feedback and opportunities for multiple rehearsals, all within an immersive whole class context, will allow preservice teachers to take risks in their practice and try out novel pedagogical moves that they may not feel secure enough, or have opportunities, to try in an actual classroom.”

“We must find a way to continue to prepare high-quality math and science teachers through this pandemic and beyond,” says Park Rogers. “Through this collaboration, we hope to offer teacher educators and their preservice student teachers a solution to the current dilemma the global pandemic of COVID-19 has created, and also alternative or supplementary methods for targeting core teaching practices even when we are able to safely return to classrooms to work with real children.”

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant 2037983. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent views of the National Science Foundation.

By Catherine Winkler, Indiana University.

The exhibition was curated by Ball State’s John Fillwalk, director of the Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts (IDIA Lab) in the College of Architecture and Planning and is both a sequel and a new concept, according to Robert La France, the museum’s director. This exhibit builds on the success of a prior exhibition curated by Fillwalk, that examined the emergence of the genre of Intermedia Art, with a particular focus on the intersection of technology and artmaking. The new show shifts the curatorial emphasis on STEAM – science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics.

This exhibition continues to position Ball State as an international center of STEAM innovation. A goal of Engaging Technology II was to invite artists exploring the edges of art and science into discourse within our community—advancing our University’s conversation regarding interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation. This collection of artists examines various aspects of the physical and life sciences, from code and biology to chemistry and physics.

Among those individuals whose work is featured in the exhibition is Adam Brown, an associate professor at Michigan State University. His live biochemical installation, The Great Work of the Metal Lover is a work that sits at the intersection of art, science and alchemy. “It uses microbiology as a technique to solve the mystery of the philosopher’s stone,” said Brown, who described the centuries-old “stone” as a legendary substance sought by alchemists who believed it capable of turning metals like mercury into gold and silver. 

His installation uses custom lab equipment to introduce a “highly specialized” bacterium into an engineered atmosphere, turning toxic gold chloride into usable 24K gold over time during the course of the show. “By the end of the exhibition, the process will produce enough gold to put in the palm of your hand,” Brown said.

Other innovative contributors to “Engaging Technology II” include code artist Casey Raes; composer and visual artist Tristian Perich; and Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, European-Russian artists who create sensory immersion environments that merge physics, chemistry and computer science with uncanny philosophical practices. 

“10000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid” is Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand’s live, audiovisual performance which was presented on the fulldome projection screen of Ball State’s Charles W. Brown Planetarium. The artwork uses a penetrating laser beam to scan the surface of soap bubbles, the behavior of which model the unique properties of
cell membranes. 

Throughout the run of Engaging Technology II, a series of invited performances, lectures and workshops were scheduled on campus and in the Muncie community to enhance the exhibition’s reach. Classes, workshops, lectures and family events were offered for local
and regional audiences. 

By Gail Werner, BSU Media Strategist
Et al.

Though a relatively small city, Columbus has made itself a cradle of modern architecture, commissioning many buildings and public works since the middle of the 20th century. The number of landmark buildings and notable architects to have worked in the city has earned it the nickname “Athens on the Prairie.”

With data and artifacts gathered by Kristin Barry’s immersive class, users of the app can explore 3D models of key buildings commissioned over the years, survey timelines showing when architects were active or buildings were constructed, and meet Columbus’ famous architects – such as Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, and Harry Weese.

After its launch, Virtual Columbus Experience will seek further funding to expand the scope and depth of the project across the community.

IDIA Lab has created a virtual gallery design system in partnership with virtual world creator Sinespace. Sinespace, a multi-user virtual world platform based in the UK, contacted IDIA to design this system for their new virtual environment. The Gallery Designer isan easy to use system to dynamically create gallery and museum exhibitions on the fly with any web hosted images – creating an exhibition with any images that can be connected to from the internet. Users can easily pick gallery styles (classical/modern), exterior settings, frame style, lighting, floosr, wall color and ceiling treatments – customizing an experience that is complementary to the exhibition theme. The gallery can then be easily published and host a virtual reception with visitors from around the globe.