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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 definitely a little sad to be organising an event on this scale without our late compadre Chris Long but I know he would have loved it. To help me pull this off, I also enlisted supported from a few other VR Education luminaries and #CPDinVR vets – Steven Sato, Daniel Dyboski-Bryant, Caitlin Krause and Karen Alexander who all coordinated and hosted a session as a part of the event. A huge thank you to all of them for being so wonderful, supportive and for giving up some of their time to help make the event so special.
The #CPDinVR anniversary should actually have been in late June but I pushed the event back by a month because I wanted to lock in my opening speaker – the one and only Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab and author of the seminal VR book “Experience on Demand.” Jeremy joined me for an exclusive, hour-long interview which you can view a recording of below. Massive thanks to Jeremy for joining us and sharing his wisdom, passion and experience with immersive technology. Another huge thank you to Carlos Austin and his film crew for capturing and live streaming the interview so professionally!
There were seven other sessions that followed the interview with Jeremy but unfortunately they were not recorded in 2D format for YouTube. I would love to say that I had the time to screencast them all and upload them but honestly right now all of my spare time is going towards work on my book Immersive Impact. We do however have the spatial recordings which means that you can load up the sessions inside ENGAGE (whether in a VR headset or just on a PC) and enjoy them in first-person!
Click here to access a folder with the spatial recordings of each session.
Download the file(s) you wish to view and then copy them to the My Recordings subfolder inside the ENGAGE folder on your PC. C:\Users\username\Documents\ENGAGE\MyRecordings
If you access ENGAGE on an Oculus Quest you will need to connect your Quest and navigate to the same folder on the headset.
Below you will find a brief synopsis of each including the hosts, guests and themes.
If you have any issues accessing or using the spatial recordings, please reach out to me or a member of the Immersive VR Education team.
Session 1: Jeremy Bailenson interview
A spatial recording of this session is available as well as the video shared above.
Session 2: Is Necessity the Mother of Invention?
Steven Sato was joined by Dr Bryan Carter and Dr Felix Duerr for a discussion on digital learning strategies and the role of VR during the pandemic.
Session 3: Youth Leaders in XR Daniel Dybowski-Bryant was joined by Kelly Lovell of BridgingTheGap And Angelina Dayton of Students in VR to discuss Youth Leaders, Impact and United Nations in XR
Session 4: Live from Dubai
I hosted an anniversary episode of my Live from Dubai chat show and was joined by special guests Emilie Joly (ZoeXR), Paula MacDowell (The University of Saskatchewan) and Amrutha Vasan (Inspirit VR) to discuss their current and future projects.
Session 5: Navigating Wonder
In this hugely popular session, Caitlin Krause was joined by The Grandfather of VR himself Tom Furness for a fascinating chat on the theme of Wonder in VR. Caitlin and Tom are already planning a follow up session on this theme so connect with Caitlin on Twitter to find out more.
Session 6: How Active VR Games Contribute to Learning
Karen Alexander chaired this special panel discussion featuring guests Mina C. Johnson-Glenberg, (President, Embodied Games, and Research Professor, Arizona State University), Cassondra Eng, (PhD Candidate in Developmental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Carnegie Mellon University) and Corinne Brenner, (Learning Scientist at Killer Snails.)
Session 7: Stanford’s Virtual Lab
Chris Madsen chatted with Matt Hasel – technology consultant at Stanford University about the way that they scanned an entire anatomy lab into ENGAGE for remote access during the pandemic.
Session 8: The Evolution of ENGAGE
The event wrapped up with a look back at the last 3 years of #CPDinVR events and the evolution of the amazing ENGAGE platform that I have consistently used to host them in. Joining me for this informal roundtable chat were David Whelan (CEO of Immersive VR Education), Mike Armstrong (Lead Developer on ENGAGE) and Chris Madsen (US Business Development Lead at IVRE).
That's all folks. I'm off to start planning next year's event. Of course in the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for more monthly #CPDinVR events, more special guests and perhaps a few surprises too.
I would like to round off by saying one last thank you - to all of the wonderful educators and other VR folk who joined the anniversary sessions. Without you there would be no events so thank you and indeed thank you to everyone who has attended the events over the last 3 years.