Students typically go to college to learn from their professors. Technology can reverse that paradigm as professors take cues from their students and sometimes learn right along with them.
That’s the case with virtual reality at Chapman University. Professors at the university’s Lawrence and Kristina Dodge College of Film and Media Arts recently experienced the phenomenon with VR that students “know as much or more about new developments than industry veterans,” said Bill Kroyer, director of Chapman’s Digital Arts Program.
To encourage exploration of VR and its related technology, augmented reality, Dodge College Dean Bob Bassett founded the Institute for Creative Reality with $100,000 in seed money from an anonymous donor. The institute is a faculty group with the mission of incubating ideas on the best ways to incorporate VR and augmented reality into education.
The institute has proposed a minor of 21 credits encompassing VR and augmented reality, which is going through Chapman’s approval process. The earliest it could be approved is January, but it wouldn’t be offered until the fall of 2018, Bassett said.
VR, also known as immersive multimedia or computer-simulated reality, is a computer technology that replicates a real or imagined environment and enables users to interact with that environment. It offers a 360-degree panoramic view. Augmented reality is an aspect of virtual reality that overlays computer graphics, information or animation onto a real-world environment, as with “Pokemon Go,” the augmented reality version of the original game that lets players capture, battle and train virtual creatures, called Pokemon, that appear on the screen as if they were in the same real-world location as the player.
Chapman already had a VR club with about 80 members before the institute, which is comprised of 30 faculty members, was created last September.
The institute is using part of the $100,000 to purchase and install VR equipment in a Dodge College classroom and upgrade a film stage for VR use, said Madeline Warren, the institute’s director and an associate professor in Dodge College. Warren was a film executive at several film production companies and studios, including New Regency Films, and independently produced the short film “Home,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for its permanent collection.
The institute Warren now directs at Chapman also used some of the funds to buy 360-degree cameras and software for the VR courses already being taught. It has also purchased some VR-compatible backpacks for students to check out and use at home.
Dodge College offered its first VR class in the January interterm, a four-week period when colleges typically offer special courses that are not taught during regular quarters. The film school offered another VR class this spring.
The college will offer an augmented reality class in the fall featuring a new augmented reality application created by Chapman alumni Sean Thielen and Jonathan Miller. They founded San Diego-based GoMeta, which developed “The Metaverse,” a digital platform for anyone to create augmented reality experiences, similar to what YouTube did for videos. The company started last August and raised $2 million in September through a seed round.
Warren said she’s excited to see the ideas the institute incubates.
“It’s very exciting because so far, the projects have been short narrative pieces or games, but as we’re able to offer more courses on a steady basis and have an entire classroom of workstations for VR, we’ll see students applying this to documentaries,” she said.
Timing is Right
Chapman’s foray into VR comes as the technology is gaining traction in entertainment, education, surgical training and tourism, and even for the treatment of medical conditions, such as depression.
Local VR companies include Irvine-based Immersive Entertainment, a VR software company; Irvine-based Pipeline VR, which is developing an online marketplace platform to match hardware and software vendors with companies interested in developing virtual and augmented reality components; and Well Told Entertainment, based at Chapman’s own incubator, Launch Labs at the Leatherby Center. It’s an augmented and virtual reality production company focused on game design and narrative content.
The most notable local VR success story came in 2014 when Facebook paid $3 billion to acquire Irvine-based Oculus VR, founded by Palmer Luckey, which makes the headsets Rift and Gear VR. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said then that he believed the technology would eventually become a part of daily life for billions. That hasn’t happened yet, but Chapman wants its students to be prepared if it does.
Engaging VR Experts
One of the first industry professionals to support Chapman’s VR efforts, even before the institute was formed, was Roy Taylor. He’s a vice president of Radeon Technology Group in Hollywood, a division of Sunnyvale-based AMD, which makes the chips that power most of the world’s video games and graphics. It also makes the chips inside the computers that make virtual reality happen—in the editing and post-production.
Taylor met Chapman’s Warren at a British Academy of Film and Television Arts event in June 2015. She invited him to speak at Dodge College and share his personal vision for the future of VR. His vision is that it can radically transform every aspect of storytelling through “our sense of immersion and ability to empathize,” he said. He spoke to students there in February 2016.
Taylor then offered to donate some computers to Dodge students and give them access to VR technology and “see what the students could do with it,” he said. He asked students to submit proposals, selected one and provided $17,000 in funding to get the short made. The result was a six-minute VR film, “The Harvest,” which was shown at Chapman last October. The screening attracted 300 people and included an augmented reality experience.
“Dodge College happens to have, in my opinion, some of the most open-minded, forward-thinking faculty with some of the world’s most talented students,” Taylor said.
The making of the film illustrated how Chapman faculty learned alongside their students. The digital arts faculty guided the film project with “solid fundamental essential principles in story, cinematography and design,” said Kroyer, an Oscar-nominated filmmaker, who was an early computer graphics pioneer on films such as “The Green Mile” and “Tron.”
“But (we) learned along with the students on new methods of virtual reality production,” said Kroyer, a member of the institute’s faculty group. “That’s the new and continuing challenge of providing a learning environment in the digital age. One must embrace innovative invention while balancing it with proven past experience.”
Another Hollywood insider, Randal Kleiser, who directed the 1978 musical “Grease,” has been on Chapman’s Dean’s Advisory Board for several years. He wrote and directed the VR series “Defrost,” and showed some of the episodes at the Cannes Film Festival in May. “Defrost” is a sci-fi VR series—shot in 3-D—consisting of 12 five-minute episodes. He’s fielding offers based on the series, he told the Business Journal from Cannes.
Kleiser said he believes Chapman is ahead of the curve in terms of virtual and augmented reality.
President on Board
Chapman President Daniele Struppa attended “The Harvest” film event and said he was impressed by what he saw. He sees virtual and augmented reality as “the new frontier,” adding that he believes their applications at the university can reach beyond entertainment, including the potential of creating a VR lab for physics experiments and biology activities.
“Instead of having to dissect an animal or organ in an anatomy class, what if you could do it [via] VR?” he said. “I believe the potential is huge.”
Students Drive Expansion
“The Harvest” was created by students Sam Wickert and Sho Schrock-Manabe when they were freshmen. They’re on track to graduate in 2019.
“Our goal was to showcase VR in a unique way to inspire other students to create their own experiences,” Schrock-Manabe said, adding that they did that by converting one of the buildings on campus into a haunted-house setting and invited Chapman students to view the film.
Wickert said he’s “thrilled and excited by Chapman’s openness to venture into this new and exciting territory with open arms.”
“Their willingness to adapt to the changing industry is incredible and very helpful to the many students interested in pursuing the new medium.”
Other Local Offerings
The University of California-Irvine does not have any VR-specific courses, said Walt Scacchi, research director of UCI’s Institute for Virtual Environments and Computer Games. But the computer game science undergraduate degree program teaches students the foundation and technologies underlying game-based virtual and augmented reality applications, he added.
