#CPDinVR

The #CPDinVR 3rd Anniversary

I can’t quite believe it’s been three years since I started hosting the #CPDinVR events. In that time I have welcomed a wide range of special guests from the world of VR in Education to my shows inside ENGAGE and had a lot of fun along the way. On July 26th, to celebrate the third anniversary of my events, I coordinated 5 hours of back-to-back sessions inside ENGAGE with the help of my regular collaborators and brothers-in-arms Chris Madsen and Mike Armstrong. It was definite

Helping Hands - hand tracking in education

It’s been a couple of months now since the experimental hand tracking feature was added to the Oculus Quest. Whilst there has not been much in the way of integration in mainstream apps, there have been some striking demo experiences available via SideQuest. If you are new to SideQuest, don’t be scared – it’s pretty straightforward. SideQuest is a free platform that allows you to load content (including apps) onto your Quest without going through the official Oculus Store. Thi

Building the Future: The VictoryXR and IVRE partnership

It’s almost three years since I started hosting the #CPDinVR events inside Engage. I initially chose Engage for my events inside VR because no other multi-user VR app at the time was fully dedicated to the education space. Also, even though the app was still in its alpha form back then, I loved the look of the app and how professional the settings and avatars looked, the fact that you could import and manipulate so many 3D assets Here’s a few pics from the very first #CPDinVR

Immersive Tech For Distance Learning pt.2

In the second part of my article on immersive technology and distance learning (read pt1 here) I want to share my top 10 suggestions for AR/VR/360° resources which can still be harnessed effectively during distance learning. These are all free to access and have scope to be harnessed across the whole curriculum. I hope you find something useful that you can use to enrich the remote learning experiences you are delivering to your students. They are also broadly device agnostic

My Professional Highlights of 2019

Happy New Year everyone. I hope that 2020 proves to be a hugely positive and successful year for you all – especially when it comes to AR and VR in classrooms! Here, slightly delayed due to my Christmas/New Year’s travels, I’m going to share my ten professional highlights of 2019. Last year I did this in video format on my YouTube channel but this year I’m going for a good, old-fashioned blog post. 2019 was a great year for me professionally and it was a pleasure to reflect

Rise of the Virtual Phoenix

Virtualiteach is back! Well to be fair it never went anywhere but it has sat dormant for almost six months now. Before I start sharing new AR and VR Education content again (regularly I promise) I wanted to just take a moment to explain the absence, the changes to the site, share a few brief insights into things that have happened in the world of immersive technology over the last few months and answer a few common questions I get asked. Why did the site go dormant? There are

The Quest for Learning: My 5 Top Tips

Those of you that have followed my work with VR over the last few years will know I’ve always been a “Vive guy.” Partly this was due to geographical limitations (Oculus never released the Rift or Go in the Middle East for some reason) and partly it was due to the relationship I built with the awesome Vive team based here in Dubai and their continued support of my work. My Vive Pro is still my “main” headset and the one I use for all the #CPDinVR events. So I watched the fervo

The World VR Day #CPDinVR event

For the second year running, Bob Fine invited me to be part of the proceedings for the World VR Day event this November. Whereas last year I hosted a chunk of the 24hrs in VR stream in AltSpace, this year I wanted to try something more ambitious... So with the help of my regular partners in crime Chris Madsen and Mike Armstrong, we set upon the idea of not only hosting an extended #CPDinVR event inside Engage but also for the first time ever, livestreaming it to YouTube AND t

Chris Long Virtual Memorial Event

It’s been just over a month since Chris Long passed away. The sudden loss of my dear friend totally broke me which is why you may have noticed a drop in my interactions on social media and a complete lack of new content here on the site. This was also due in part to the fact that I wanted the next post to be this one – sharing the footage from the memorial event we hosted inside Engage for Chris on May 11th. The problem was, watching the footage back was incredibly difficult

An Interview with VR Pioneer Tom Furness

Over the last 20 months I’ve had the privilege of welcoming some amazing guests onto #CPDinVR. From educational pioneers like Jaime Donally and the VR Podcast crew to rockstar developers like Tony “Skarred Ghost” Vitillo and Cosmo Scharf to some of immersive tech’s heavy-hitters like John Westra and Charlie Fink. I even managed to convince HTC Vive President Alvin Wang Graylin to deliver the opening keynote presentation for my first anniversary event. I am eternally grateful

VR in Art Education Panel Discussion

I want to start off by apologising for the lack of recordings from my #CPDinVR events of late. We've had some stellar guests on delivering presentations, speaking on panels or joining me for my Live From Dubai chatshow and for various reasons I've not been able to share recordings for the last few events. Thankfully, we seem to have turned a corner and I am delighted to share with you the full recording from the March 1st panel discussion session on VR for Art Education. I wa

The #CPDinVR First Anniversary Event

In June 2017 I decided to try something new, something that hadn’t been done before in education – to host a professional development session inside virtual reality. I chose the Engage platform from Immersive VR Education as it was the best tool for this job and with the help of Immersive’s founder and CEO David Whelan and Engage’s lead developer Mike Armstrong, I set about coordinating what would be the very first #CPDinVR event. The image you can see below is actually one I

The Ready Player One #CPDinVR event

Last night saw the return of #CPDinVR with one of the biggest groups yet in attendance. The session had a Ready Player One theme and explored the way education in the future is portrayed in the book. With the film version due this month, there was great interest from the educational VR community to discuss this theme. We started with an abridged version of the keynote presentation on this theme that I had delivered earlier in the week at the Education Experts Conference in Du

The #CPDinVR Panel - December 2017

After a month off due to a combination of illness, moving house and a bunch of other commitments, I hosted the final #CPDinVR event of 2017 last night. This session was a panel discussion about AR and VR in education and joining me were Steven Sato from the USA, Alex Johnson who is based in India and special guest Hervé Fontaine - European VP of HTC Vive. We also welcomed one of our biggest crowds yet with educators from the UK, USA, China, the UAE and many more in the audie

VR for Empathy panel discussion

On September 15th I held the most recent #CPDinVR session inside Engage. This was a special panel discussion about the power of VR to elicit empathy in users. I was joined by David Romero (Technical Specialist for HTC Vive), Dominic Eskofier (Head of VR EMEIA for NVIDIA ) and Sean Gilroy (Head of Cognitive Design at The BBC) as well as an audience of around 30 other people from all corners of the globe. Whilst Engage is still in Alpha, exporting recordings when I am hosting t

Video footage from #CPDinVR panel discussion

On August 15th, I hosted the most recent #CPDinVR sessions inside Engage. The first was an encore presentation of the original session from June and the second was a new panel discussion exploring AR and VR in education. On the panel were Martin Bukacek (Community Shaman at Lifeliqe), Mercedes Bent (CEO of Ben Toppin and former VP at Upload VR) and Alex Chaucer (host of the #VREDUchat on Twitter and pioneering VR educator.) The team at Immersive VR Education added some amazin

#CPDinVR - Behind the Scenes

There's been a lot of interest in the CPD sessions that I have been hosting inside the Engage platform and educators have been asking me how it works. The team at Immersive VR Education have created a phenomenal platform with Engage and it allows me to do some quite astounding things when I'm inside it hosting sessions. I was recently chatting to Corey Engstrom from Teach in VR about it and offered to produce a little screencast from the host's perspective. You can find the