Virtual reality (VR) uses advanced display and immersive audio technologies to create an interactive, three-dimensional image or environment. Augmented reality (AR), meanwhile, uses digital technology to overlay video and audio onto the physical world to provide information and embellish our experiences. At the University of Rochester, we’re crossing disciplines to collaborate on VR/AR innovations that will revolutionize how we learn, discover, heal, and create as we work to make the world ever better.
“This is awesome,” said Brendan Eder ’19, moments after setting eyes on a tabletop glowing brightly in a darkened room in Wegmans Hall. The chemical engineering major from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, repeated that comment more than once during the next half hour, as he and two other students continually rearranged coffee mugs and popsicle sticks on the tabletop’s glass surface to simulate reactions in a real-life, sprawling chemical plant. The exercise was part of an innovative, augmented reality (AR) teaching experiment in which:
- Coffee mugs became virtual 10-cubic meter reactors – both plug flow reactors (PFR) and continuous stirred tank reactors (CSTR);
- popsicle sticks served as the virtual pipes that connect them;
- a nob let students adjust the temperature inside each reactor as it was added to the configuration;
- QR coding on the bottom of the reactors enabled a camera inside the table to capture each reactor’s precise location;
- the information was relayed to a computer where the simulations were run;
- and a projector inside the table flashed the results onto the tabletop—all in real time.
‘A needed piece in higher education’
More important, however, is the effect the table could have on optimizing the students’ educational experience. “This is a really a needed piece in higher education,” says April Luehmann, an associate professor and director of secondary science education at the Warner School of Education, who is collaborating on the project. “We know a lot about what’s important in learning that doesn’t ever get translated into the classroom,” she says. Opportunities to engage in dialogue with fellow learners; to make mistakes; to wrestle with complex, real-life problems that have no single answer; and to physically interact in an environment—all of these should be part of the process, she says. “That doesn’t happen when students are asked to do problems one through four on page 262, turn it in, and the only interaction they have is with a professor who tells you whether the final number you arrived at is right or wrong.” “A table like this can allow so much more than that to happen,” Luehmann says. Eventually, the table will be connected to the University’s super computer, allowing for even more sophisticated simulations, says Brendan Mort, director of the Center for Integrated Computing (CIRC), who is also collaborating on the project. White, Luehmann, and Mort have also proposed working with the Rochester Museum & Science Center on developing an AR platform simulating oil and water at the molecular level, to show what happens when there’s an oil spill. White, whose expertise is in using experiments, molecular simulations, and machine-learning to design new materials, has explored other innovative ways to teach his students. For example, he loaded all of his lectures and course content for a class on numerical methods and statistics onto an open source web application called Jupyter Notebook, where students can:- create their own notebooks to do homework and keep notes;
- easily copy and paste all the equations and other course content they need;
- use the platform’s interactive features to solve the equations and to create dynamic graphs;
- incorporate videos, text, and code all in the same documents;
- and export their work as websites, PDFs, or slideshows.