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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.

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. This might seem shady but in truth it’s more about giving smaller developers the opportunity to share builds, betas and projects with a wider audience. It’s also being used to get Quest-ready projects in the hands of users whilst developers wait through the glacial process of being accepted to the official store. Engage is one key example here as SideQuest is the only way to install it right now. In fact the Engage site has a great step-by-step guide to installing SideQuest (and Engage obviously) so click here to access that and get SideQuest set up for yourself. Once you get into SideQuest, you’ll find that there is heaps of content you can install quickly and easily. It’s tagged into categories for searchability and you will find a Hand Tracking category full of some very unique, unusual and often quite weird experiences. Here’s a little montage of some of the recent Hand Tracking experiences I have tested out… Once you get over the nightmarish hand-fingers and goop ball visuals, I want to bring things back to an educational mindset and think a little about how hand tracking will benefit students and potentially elevate educational VR experiences. The integration of hand tracking could really be beneficial to VR in education for a number of reasons. I remember when Suzanne Lee was a guest on #CPDinVR Live from Dubai recently and spoke about her work using VR with patients with dementia. One thing Suzanne highlighted was how useful hand tracking was going to be for her work as the patients she worked with would generally forget the various buttons and control mechanics that they would need to use from one day to the next. The same logic can applied to using VR with students since it would remove the friction related to user interface (if it’s done well) and make it easier for students to engage with VR experiences more independently. The integration of hand tracking also brings us one step closer to the goal of haptic VR experiences wherein virtual objects can be touched and interacted with as if they were real. This will lead to more kinaesthetic learning experiences for students as they interact within the virtual world. Artists will be able to pick up a brush and paint. Scientists will be able to wield tools and instruments. Historians will be able to hold and manipulate artefacts. The possibilities are vast and the impact on the depth of learning due to the increased sense of presence will be equally augmented. Just imagine if hand tracking was integrated into VR apps like Hold the World - letting you hold the fossils directly, or HoloLab Champions - measuring the chemicals with even greater control and precision! The addition of hand tracking also elevates the user’s ability to emote more naturally using gestures. This will have implications within multi-user educational experiences as students will now be able to do more than simply raise an arm or point it vaguely in the direction they wish you to focus. It opens up a world of smaller details, where learners can highlight minute elements within an experience for closer inspection, evaluation, analysis and more. Hand tracking may seem like a small step but it is definitely a set in the right direction one that I think will herald many new educational experiences within virtual spaces. I’m excited to see what developers come up with and what comes next.

There are definitely some over-saturated subject areas when it comes to virtual reality in education. Science is by far the most common subject which developers gravitate towards I find, with themes like space and dinosaurs being recycled time and time again. I do understand the logic in focusing on these themes - they are the more “exciting” topics that are likely to have cross-over appeal beyond the education sector and into the realm of more casual users and even gamers. What I have also seen is a real lack of quality VR content in certain other subject areas. In some cases there is so little content that it almost feels like opportunities are being missed. One such area is English Literature. Whilst the potential of VR as a medium for language instruction is definitely being tapped into already (hit up Michael at Gold Lotus for live English lessons in VR) there are very few virtual reality experiences dedicated to literature. The more creation-focused educators will be thinking about using platforms like CoSpaces and Tilt Brush to create the worlds of the stories that they are studying – but I am focused on transposing these classic tales into the immersive medium of virtual reality. Like so many have been turned into movies and shows in the past. There are some options for the literature classroom, don’t get me wrong. There are some 360° videos related to books on YouTube e.g. If there’s a movie version of the book you are studying, you’ll likely have more luck finding a 360° e.g. The Jungle Book clip above. For more 360° clips, check out the 360 English playlist on my YouTube channel) There are very few actual VR apps based on classic stories. In fact a fresh trawl through the various app stores really did reveal slim pickings beyond this old Jack and the Beanstalk experience: From time to time you also get games that borrow a theme from a classic narrative such as the recent Down the Rabbit Hole. Another option would be to draft some new narratives into your curriculum – ones that were born into the virtual reality medium. There are some excellent examples in this regard – from the Google Spotlight Stories to the immersive stories produced under the Oculus Stories banner like Henry (below). The problem with this is that if your curriculum is locked in to using specific works by acclaimed authors, you may not have the scope to use anything different. So why the lack of high-quality VR experiences based on classic literature? I imagine in part this could be to do with licensing rights, though classic literature would not bear that issue. There’s also the matter of length. We see all the time how Hollywood abridges chunky tomes down to palatable 2 hour movies. VR would need to do the same (or more) which could be off-putting to some developers. However there are a couple of brilliant examples of what is possible when the medium of virtual reality is used for literature. Most of these are broadly available to the public through app stores yet and may never be… but they do offer a tantalising vision of how narratives transpose into engaging interactive experiences in VR. Joycestick Joycestick is an interactive experience based on the legendary novel Ulysses by James Joyce which started as student project at Boston College. You can read a lot more information about this project here. Metamorphosis Franz Kafka’s infamous tale of transformation was brought to haunting life at Prague’s Goethe-Institute and has since been on display at various other venues around the world. Find out more here. Theatre VR – Hamlet I was eagerly awaiting the launch of this platform which proposed to let you step inside Hamlet and act out key scenes. It seems to have since gone dormant (and my attempt to revisit the website was met with a Trojan infection warning) but nonetheless, I still think this type of app will become more popular in years to come. The Raven Edgar Allen Poe's classic poem comes to visceral life in this VR experience which is actually available for free on the Oculus Store. I wish there were more examples to share with you but there really aren’t. If I had to think of five that I’d love to see, I think it would be: 1. Dracula - and not just a vampire shooting/staking game 2. Macbeth - and you choose which character’s viewpoint you adopt 3. Oliver Twist – and not a musical version 4. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – in fact ANY Roald Dahl would be amazing 5. Coraline – I adore this Neil Gaiman story and I think VR is the perfect medium for it What classic literature would you like to see transposed into VR? Shout at me on Twitter (@steve_bambury) if you want to share your ideas or start a discussion. Finally I wanted to give a shout out to my good friend and former colleague Mel Guidera. Mel is one of the best English teachers I've ever met and a conversation with her last year was the original impetus for this article.

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 event from June 2017: Over the last few years, I’ve found people often assume that I work for Engage creators Immersive VR Education. Whilst I know David, Sandra, Mike, Chris and many of the other great members of the IVRE team (and have even visited their offices in Ireland), I’ve never worked for the company directly. I just love Engage and moreover, I love introducing people to the platform. I’ve had the pleasure of welcoming an unbelievable stream of guests onto my #CPDinVR events from innovative educators to academic thought leaders to world-class developers and more. I love vicariously experiencing Engage for the first time again with people and seeing the sparks fly as they start to think of new possibilities for education and training using this mind-blowing platform. I’ve watched inspirational educators like Daniel Bryant go on to host the amazing Educators in VR events after attending #CPDinVR. (Find out more about those here) and after keynoting my #CPDinVR first anniversary event in 2018, Alvin Wang Graylin (China President of HTC Vive) chose Engage to host the recent Vive Ecosystem Conference ( and was joined by other former #CPDinVR alumni including Tom Furness and Charlie Fink.) Last year, one guest I welcomed to the show was the wonderful Steve Grubbs - CEO of Victory XR. Steve joined an episode of my Live from Dubai talk show to chat about some of the great projects Victory had worked on and some new things in their pipeline. Victory burst onto the VR education scene with the award-winning frog dissection experience featuring acclaimed science teacher Wendy Martin in holographic form. It's an app I've mentioned many times here on the site and definitely one of the very best educational VR apps I've seen to date. Victory have since launched a wide range of other science-themed VR experiences covering a wealth of content. This includes other dissection experiences and a host of other science content. They’ve even begun to produce some awesome AR content too – my favourite being Victor the Torso… Steve loved being on my show and was struck by the quality of Engage. Little did I know that this ended up sowing a seed for something quite special – a partnership between Victory XR and Immersive VR Education. This is pretty unprecedented and really incredible news for the VR education space. Two of the most talented and dedicated educational immersive technology companies working together is going to lead to some amazing learning experiences for students. I got a taste of what’s to come last week when I was invited to attend a demonstration lesson inside Engage and coordinated by the Victory team. Wendy Martin (she of holographic frog dissection fame) led an awesome live science lesson with a group of students. The lesson showed off a host of activities that really made the most of Engage’s features including the use of spatial audio to allow for group work, 360° video integration for virtual field trips and shared IFX for interacting with learning artefects. Here’s a short look at the experience: This session was essentially hosted as a proof-of-concept to promote the new VictoryXR Academy but to me it was so much more. In 2018 the late, great Chris Long coordinated the “#ClassroomVR” experiment alongside the Immersive VR Education team and the UK Vive team and I was on-hand to deliver a remote lesson to students from Chris’ college alongside Pixar co-founder Loren Carpenter. It took a huge amount of work from everyone involved to coordinate and the hardware had to be brought on site to the college especially for the event. You can read Chris’ full write-up of it all right here. In my opinion this was the proof-of-concept moment. What I saw Steve, Wendy and the Victory team deliver last week was a much more fully-formed experience. It was kinaesthetic, interactive and multi-faceted and most importantly it was absolutely immersive and engaging for the students involved. I was genuinely blown away and stood watching this stellar learning experience play out thinking, “this is what we’ve been waiting for” - real, live, purposeful learning inside virtual spaces. I love that this synergy between two of my favourite VR companies has happened and I’m proud to have played a small role in it happening. I honestly can’t wait to see what the future holds for this new partnership between Immersive and Victory. If this opening salvo is anything to go by, it really could herald in a new era for educational VR and I hope that other companies working in this field follow their lead and look for opportunities to collaborate with their peers. If we start bringing the industry together rather than working in silos, we may start to see VR adoption levels in schools really skyrocket. Find out more about VictoryXR here Find our more about Immersive VR Education here

Some of the most innovative practice in virtual reality design takes place within the game industry. So what if you could take some of those ideas, concepts and features and transpose them to an educational experience? This article is another one that'd been sitting on the back-burner for some time so it's great to finally get it out there. Since it was something I felt that developers (as well as educators) would enjoy and potentially benefit from, I decided to offer this one to the great folks at VR Focus. Head over to the VR Focus site to read it in full by clicking here. If you want to take a look at some of the other content I've written for VR Focus in the last couple of years, please click here.

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 or at least do not rely on students having access to hardware like high-end VR headsets. YouTube There’s no denying the fact that there’s heaps of great educational 360° videos on YouTube which students can access on any device. You may remember that last year I actually curated over 1000 of these into subject-specific playlists on my channel – which makes it a great way to streamline your hunt for relevant clips. Click here to find them. Jigspace I’ve written about this AR platform here on VirtualiTeach before and in all the time since the launch of Apple’s ARkit tech, Jigspace really have outdone themselves – even launching their awesome parallel Jig Workshop app for designing your own experiences. To me, this is what an educational AR app should strive to be – more than just models. To top it off, the Jig-crew have even added a neat Coronavirus jig that students can interact with. Find out more about Jisgpace via https://jig.space CoSpaces Edu Another app I’ve covered here on the site before and one that affords both AR and VR creation through its excellent entry-level 3D design platform. The basic plan is free and CoSpaces are offering Pro licenses for free throughout school closures too which is awesome. One of the best things about using this for distance learning though is the fact that when you set a task for your class, you get a live tiled view of what they are doing! Find out more about CoSpaces Edu via https://cospaces.io/edu/ You can also read my article on 10 reasons to use CoSpaces Edu with students here. Google Tour Creator I was tempted to add Google Expeditions to the list here but since you’d be limited to just having students run solo tours, why not have them build the tours themselves? Tour Creator lets students sew together 360° images of their own or ones from Google Street View and the completed tours can be uploaded to Poly – so teachers and peers can even access them and potentially even assess them! So much potential and it could be a great way to share more about where you and your students are based with others around the world facing the same challenges right now. Learn more about Google Tour Creator here: https://arvr.google.com/tourcreator Portals: Learning with AR With students stuck indoors around the clock right now, it’s a great opportunity to use a portal app to let them use AR to transport themselves somewhere new. Of all the AR portal apps out there, I still recommend this one over most others as it’s the only one with a dedicated education-theme and includes portals to some really interesting worlds. Use it as a stimulus for creative writing and your students will absolutely love it. You can see it in action (along with a couple of other portal apps) in this video I recorded last year. Download the Portals AR app on iOS here. Within Another platform that I’m a long-time fan of and one that I’ve mentioned here on the site numerous times. Within has a brilliant library of thought-provoking 360° films which can be viewed on any device. Superb for use with older students as a means to engage them with a theme or topic. I actually put some lesson plans together a couple of years ago for some of the Within experiences which you can find here. Learn more about Within via www.with.in Quiver As long as your students have access to a printer, Quiver offers a lot of great free AR colouring sheets and doesn’t require the newest of mobile devices to use them with. In fact I’ve been using Quiver as far back as 2014 (when it was still called ColAR) with some old Gen.2 iPads. Whilst the education content isn’t free, there are several free sheets which can be used with students including: - The Education Starter pack includes the volcano, Pi, the Earth, a flag and both animal and plant cells! - The Dot Day page – can be used to design planets, badges, logos and more - The Starbucks cup – could be used as a part of a lesson on marketing - The Scarlet Macaw from Intertwined Conservation - The Butterfly life-cycle page from California State Parks - The Chick-fil-A Colour crafters packs Access Quiver app and pages downloads via www.quivervision.com Sketchfab Sketchfab has long been the world’s largest repository of 3d models and can be accessed via the web as well as its free mobile apps. Whilst you would have to pay to download and use a lot of the models in your own projects, you can view pretty much everything for free. There is also the option to view the content in both VR (mobile and webVR) and AR (mobile). Whilst the content stored here is quite broad, a quick search will generally turn up models that relate to most subject areas be it history, science or geography. Also, in the last couple of years, more and more museums have started to 3D scan their collections of artefacts and upload them to Sketchfab. This page here curates all of the various museum collections together including some amazing content from The British Museum, the Science Museums Group, The Natural History Museum and many, many more. Nearpod I’ve been using Nearpod as a part of remote training sessions I’ve been facilitating over the last few weeks and in fact my company name (Digital Inception) even comes from a remote training session Luke Rees and I delivered to USC back in 2013. Nearpod has a vast library of virtual field trips now including content linked to pretty much every subject area. They’ve also made student-paced mode open to all account levels now meaning that you can deploy an interactive Nearpod presentation with embedded 360° field trips) without the need to deliver it live. A definite must for engaging remote learning experiences! Access Nearpod and learn more via www.nearpod.com You can also read this article I wrote about the expansion to Nearpod's virtual field trip offering a couple of years back. Engage It would be remiss of me not to include Engage on this list despite my Back to the Future analogy earlier. Engage (i.e. the platform I use for my #CPDinVR) events has already shown its amazing potential during these unique times with HTC Vive recently hosting its entire VEC Conference inside the platform. As mentioned above, Engage is one of the social VR platforms that does afford 2D access via a PC, meaning that students with a VR headset can still join sessions within a virtual classroom – or even on Mars! Within Engage a teacher can incorporate video, 360° media, 3D models and more to create a uniquely rich and exciting learning space. They can even record their lesson spatially and allow students who can’t access a live lesson to step back into the full 3D recording as if they were there! Find out more and download Engage for your device via https://engagevr.io

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change" This widely known quotation attributed to Charles Darwin seems more apt than ever right now. Notwithstanding the fact that Darwin never actually said this, the sentiment definitely holds up as we watch the entire human race adapt to a whole new paradigm of self-isolation, quarantine, remote work and remote learning. These unprecedented times have really forced the education community to adapt to survive like never before. Mass roll-outs of Teams, Seesaw and Google Classroom have taken place worldwide and teachers have demonstrated incredible determination and dedication to try and keep their schools afloat on uncharted, tumultuous waters. (NB this baby is actually completing a first draft of a thesis on particle physics😁) So where does immersive tech fit into this new world? Is it part of the adaptation we need to survive or a skin we shed as we evolve as an industry? In many ways we have seen it be firmly placed on a backburner. Even schools that had dabbled with AR and VR have had to shift their focus towards the efficient and accessible delivery of remote learning on a daily basis. Not only is this understandable, it’s definitely the right approach right now especially when you factor in the army of parents who are now not only working remotely but having to facilitate their children’s distance education. But as we settle into a longer term of distance learning (here in the UAE confirmation has just come out that schools won’t reopen before the summer now) and educators and students become more accustomed to the logistics and systems for content delivery, the need to innovate, captivate and inspire will increase again – and this is where immersive tech will be incredibly useful. We do need to think carefully though - AR and VR both have some serious limitations now schools have been forced to adopt distance learning, mostly due to acces sibility and hardware. Augmented Reality is the easier option of course, since so many kids now have an AR-enabled device but schools do still need to consider equitable access. If you have a standardised BYOD program and you know for sure that all of your students have a specific generation of device (like an ARkit-enabled iPad) then you’re totally able to deploy AR-enriched learning experiences. If not, you may find that the only fair way to embed AR equitably would be to deploy older AR experiences that rely on markers (of course this then relies on families having printers…) VR hits a bigger roadblock in terms of equitable access because quite simply VR headsets have not hit mass adoption yet. I’d love to say that we’d hit that RP1 sweet-spot where everyone has access to a connected Oasis of experiences but it simply is not the case. A limited number of students will currently have access to a VR headset at home but even then many of these will be PSVR or cheap mobile VR headsets (possibly without access to phones). Schools who have invested in banks of headsets – perhaps to kit out a small VR lab or in the form of some Class VR sets, are not able to harness these devices remotely. It really is a shame that students don’t yet have broader access to higher level VR hardware because connecting in a truly immersive, interactive, social VR world is the epitome of what we need right now. But whilst some businesses and conferences have already shown that this is a viable option, hardware limitations and accessibility put this apex just out of reach for most schools. It’s what I sometimes refer to as a “Marty McFly moment” - remember that part at the end of Back to the Future where Marty rocks out a blistering guitar solo in front of a bewildered crowd of 50’s teens? As he screeches to a halt and realises that he it is too much for them, he tells them, “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet…but your kids are going to love it.” I genuinely think that if what we are currently facing happened 5-10 years from now, we’d be talking less about Teams and Zoom and more about AltSpace or Engage as the core platforms for remote classes. The truth is that multi-user virtual worlds really do represent the ultimate way for us to come together despite imposed barriers that have been forced upon us so it is a shame that this tech remains just beyond the reach of most students right now. So does this mean VR is unusable during this time of remote learning? Well the answer is both yes and no. Whilst we can’t rely on students having access to VR headsets, we can still harness some immersive content remotely – we just need to make sure that it is device agnostic and will support access from tablets or PCs as well. As such, 360° media becomes a pretty clear lifeline for educational VR though there are a few other options to look at too. In fact some of the social, multi-user platforms, such as Engage, AltSpace and Rumii offer 2D access via tablets or laptops. Obviously this level of access is somewhat limited and the loss of presence within the virtual space definitely limits their impact - but they can still be harnessed pretty effectively – especially if the educator leading the class DOES have a proper 6DOF headset to access the platform with. Ultimately I do understand that right now educators are hastily doing their best to adapt to using core platforms like Office 365 to deliver their entire curriculum and in many cases, this alone is a monumental shift for them. I would not suggest that any educator who is still finding their digital feet starts looking into something like immersive technology tools. However as the term moves on and this way of teaching and learning does start to feel more like the new normal, I think more and more educators will begin to look for new ways to augment the content they are sharing with students. Innovative thinkers in our industry will seek new ways to bring remote learning to life and in this respect, even lower-end immersive tools, which are accessible to all students, can help redefine tasks in unique ways. As McFly said – your kids are going to love it! In part 2 of this piece, I share my top 10 immersive tech tools for use during distance learning. Click here to read it.

I’ll share the graphic of the model first for those that just came for that. Feel free to download/share as you wish but please do tag me in any posts on social media! Below the graphic I’m going to write a full recount of the project, dating back to early 2018 for those that are interested in the trials, tribulations and all that went into the process. Let me just say now though – a massive thank you to Steven Sato, Chris Long and Alex Johnson for their insight, support and time helping me get this done. So… the last month has been pretty challenging to say the least. I’ve watched schools close and had to adjust how I work with them as a consultant but I’ve been doing it with one arm. At the end of February, I was back at the GESS Conference here in Dubai for the eighth year running and for the second year in a row, I’d coordinated and was hosting the immersive technology stage. All was going brilliantly until myself and Alex Johnson (who’d flown in for the event and was staying with me) returned to my villa to find a burst pipe had been streaming out water for hours and flooded the ground floor. After more than an hour of draining and mopping up all the water… I slipped and in trying to protect my head, took the full force on my elbow. Diagnosis – hairline fracture and a full arm cast for at least a month! I missed the second of the three days of GESS due to the injury which was a little heart-breaking after all the work I’d put into coordinating the stage and preparing my own presentations. I did return on day three (complete with my arm in a sling) and was finally able to debut something that I’d been working on (and somewhat putting off) for around two years – my work on Bloom’s Taxonomy and VR. Having the cast on my arm also delayed my ability to share this project more widely here on VirtualiTeach but with my arm now on the mend, I am finally in a position to share the whole thing. Let’s start with the history of the project… It was March 2018 when I first decided to look at how Bloom’s related to VR. It was the one year anniversary of when I published my original version of the Depths of VR Model and I wanted to put something else out that would capture the attention of the broader education community and help drive interest in VR as a medium for learning. Having worked with various forms of edtech for a number of years at this point, I was very familiar with both the original and revised versions of Bloom’s model and the various incarnations of it that had been applied since Andrew Churches published Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy. I must admit, it seemed at the time like simple idea to adapt. Much like the various iPad/Google App/web apps versions that have been published over the years, my aim was to share something that curated different 6DOF virtual reality experiences into some form of palatable graphic. In early 2018, with 3DOF, mobile VR being the only real experience of virtual reality that schools had access to, it was clear that a common misconception was emerging – that VR was a very passive media consumption tool and had little to offer educators who were busy harnessing iPads and the like to allow students to create and develop a range of multimedia projects. I wanted to use the alignment with Bloom’s to prove that true VR had a lot more to offer. Simple right? It was only when I set about completing this task that I started to hit some roadblocks. Primarily, the experiential nature of virtual reality seemed to completely negate the lowest level of Bloom’s model – “Remember” and I knew that suggesting that this could be somewhat controversial in education circles. After hunting for examples and trying to look at the project in a few different ways, it became clear that I needed some outside input so I reached out to three good friends who were already VR education pioneers - Steven Sato, Alex Johnson and Chris Long. I started a group discussion thread with them as well as a shared document and we started to discuss the project as well as the little roadblock I had hit. They started suggesting ideas but eventually someone would justify why the suggested app was more than just remembering information. Here’s a peek at where the conversation got to around this point – Not long after this, unable to find a resolution that we were all happy with, I shelved this for a while and moved on with some other projects. Around a year later, in February 2019 I looked at it again briefly with Chris Long and we decided that we would endeavour to complete and publish it before the end of the year. And then as many of you will already know, in May 2019 Chris suddenly died, bringing pretty much everything I was doing with VR to a screeching halt as I mourned the loss of my dear friend. If you want to learn more about how influential Chris was within the VR education community, please do watch the recording of his memorial event inside Engage to hear testimonials from a lot of other amazing people who felt the loss of this wonderful guy as much as I did. So when I was asked to coordinate the GESS 2020 immersive tech stage around October of last year, the very first thing I pencilled in was Bloom’s Taxonomy and VR. I felt that I owed it to Chris to see the project through to the end. Looking at it with fresh eyes and two years’ worth of more VR apps to consider, I also decided that I had to stop fighting against our initial conclusion and stop trying to push experiences into the lower level of the Bloom’s Model. What was clear though was that I now had a genuine abundance of stellar 6DOF educational content that could be included on the intended graphic and I would highlight the fact that the apps on the version you see here are merely intended as examples (thanks to Alex for the input on a couple of these.) One thing is clear to me at the end of this project. Virtual reality, REAL virtual reality truly has so much more to offer than just being a passive tool for the consumption of media. It can allow students to harness a range of higher order thinking skills from analysing historical sources to evaluating scientific experiments to using motion capture style technology to create animations. The visceral, immersive nature of the medium engages the minds of students in ways that we genuinely cannot accomplish with other forms of media.

Over the last term and a half I’ve been working with some amazing staff and students at Safa British School here in Dubai. As a part of their dedication to promoting the Sustainable Development Goals as well as covering core Science themes, the students have been learning about healthy living this term and I was more than happy to supplement their curriculum with some VR-enriched projects. I coordinated one core project as a part of their Computing curriculum and also facilitated a special enrichment project with a couple of students. The CoSpaces Edu project I’ve written about CoSpaces here on the site before and it’s definitely one of the VR platforms which has garnered the widest acclaim and adoption levels in schools so far. For the Year 6 computing project I used CoSpaces Edu with students to let them present information about healthy living in a fresh, engaging way (rather than a PowerPoint!) In the first session they created their free accounts and then explored the platform - testing some of the example projects available in the gallery. This was important as I needed them to have some sense of what was possible and what types of assets were available to them before they began designing projects for themselves. The following session gave them offline time to plan their project. They brainstormed a wide range of possible ideas and filtered these down to the one core concept which they wanted to take through to the design stage. Session 3 saw them beginning the design of their project within CoSpaces. Shout out to the wonderful James McCrary for hooking us up with 30 day Pro licenses Whilst these were not technically essential for the project (as the basic version of CoSpaces comes with a decent amount of assets as well as the ability to search online and import additional ones) it was nice to give the students more tools and it would become more important at the coding stage. So as the projects evolved, the coding began. Students were familiar with block-based coding so I gave them the freedom to incorporate the code elements as they saw fit. Many chose to use conditional programming to make objects interactive – from characters speaking to the user to inanimate objects coming to life or sharing facts when clicked. One clever student actually designed a quiz game where an incorrect answer transferred you to a separate scene – where you found yourself in a jail cell (“it’s healthy eating prison” she told me.) In the final session, students evaluated their projects (and I assessed them) but they also got to experience them in VR. The school uses Class VR headsets which makes accessing CoSpaces projects easy as you can drag and drop links to spaces directly into the Class VR interface and then push these to the headsets. I also took one of my Oculus Quests in to test and using the Firefox Reality browser, I found that I could log into CoSpaces and open a project then click the VR icon and enter the space in a fully-immersive way with the quest controllers automatically mapping to control movement and interaction. Very cool. The Mindshow project The second project I coordinated at the school was a special enrichment project in collaboration with Sophie Barber – the Head of Creative Arts. Sophie dropped into one of my AMA (ask Me Anything) sessions to enquire about anything new and innovative for performing arts. I showed her some clips of previous Mindshow projects I’d worked on and she was excited to have some SBS students try it out. The following week she selected a couple of talented performers from Year 6 and I led them through a demo session with Mindshow. We decided to also focus on their healthy living topic and I knew that there was a great option within the app – the fridge setting. So we explored the fridge and its contents and came up with the idea to frame the piece like a news report, sharing a healthy options and an unhealthy option for each segment. Having paired the food items accordingly and saved the scene, the students went away to do a little research and write their script. (side note - how cool is that for a space to do VR in?!) The following week we recorded the segments using a Vive Pro. As Mindshow has a 30 second limit on clips, we recorded and exported each piece of the project separately and then I dropped them into Corel Videostudio to sequence and trim off any lead-ins/outs. I also filmed the two girls as they recorded and if you click on the video below you can watch some footage of them in action as well as the full version of their final project. I want to say a huge thank you to the staff and students at Safa British School. Everyone was both welcoming and engaged with the projects I coordinated at the school and it was my absolute pleasure to work with them all. You can find out more about using CoSpaces Edu here. You can find out more about using Mindshow here.

Over the last couple of months I’ve been writing a guest blog series for HTC Vive covering my work integrating VR at JESS Dubai between 2017-2019. A lot of the projects covered have been spotlighted here on VirtualiTeach during that period but I thought it’d be worth sharing the links to the Vive blog posts nonetheless as they bring all that content together nicely. There are three parts: The first part focuses on my initial trials using the Vive at JESS in 2017. It also includes video clips of several of these projects. You can read that first part by clicking here. The second post focuses specifically on the Art projects we coordinated using Tilt Brush. That part can be read here. The third and final part of the series looks at some of the later projects including the use of the original Vive Focus in 2018 and the Vive Pro in 2019. You can read that part here. Working at JESS was incredible and though I was there for 11 years in total, the last three years as Head of Digital Learning and Innovation were really special to me. Working under the brilliant Mark Steed, I was afforded the freedom to innovate and explore the power and potential of virtual reality. A huge thank you to Mark and all of the amazing educators at JESS who I worked with on VR projects over the last 5 years – I would not be where I am now without you.

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 on the highlights. So, in no particular order: Interviewing Tom Furness Being able to interview “The Grandfather of VR” Tom Furness inside VR as a part of my #CPDinVR events was a truly remarkable experience. It’s crazy to think that whilst Tom has worked with immersive technologies since the 60’s, this was his first ever interview inside VR. To say it was amazing would be an understatement – in fact as soon as I turned things over to the audience for Q+A, someone refers to the event as life-changing! You can watch the recording below but if you want to experience it for yourself, click here to access the spatial recordings from Engage and you can actually sit in the session yourself. Hosting the VR Stage at GESS 2019 The GESS Conference, which takes place in Dubai each year, is the biggest education event in The Middle East. I have presented at GESS since 2013, won their awards twice and now I even judge the awards. 2019 saw my collaboration with the event go to a whole new level though as I was asked to coordinate and host a dedicated VR stage for the whole 3 day event. With the help of the local HTC Vive team, who provided the hardware, I hosted a range of speakers, live TilT Brush demos from students and delivered a range of different presentations myself (at one point having to run to the main stage, speak, then run back to deliver a presentation on the VR stage minutes later!) I am delighted to confirm that not only am I coordinating the stage again form the 2020 event but it has expanded to include even more speakers, covering botb AR and VR in education. It should be awesome. Find out more here. Speaking at the G20 event I spoke at a lot of conferences in 2019 but as the year came to a close, I was invited to fly to Saudi Arabia and deliver the closing keynote to a group of G20 delegates visiting King Faisal School in Riyadh. Now I am conscious of the elephant in the room here – Saudi Arabia is quite the contentious place right now – but if things are going to change, overhauling the education system and the way that students view learning is fundamental. If I can play a small part in that, I am happy to do it. Whilst at the school I got to work with three students who are brothers on a VR video clip to share as a part of the closing keynote. This was recorded inside Engage and edited together to give a vision of where these three incredibly bright, well-mannered and impressive young men could end up. Take a look – The launch of Digital Inception Another obvious highlight for me in 2019 was leaving JESS Dubai after 11 years to set up my own education consultancy. This was an incredibly daunting prospect and involved a huge amount of work but I am delighted to say that things are going incredibly well. So well in fact that I have yet to actually advertise my services (or even set up the company website) as word of mouth and my reputation across the region has kept me very busy throughout the first school term. If you are interested in bringing me into your school, please don’t hesitate to contact me using the Contact form here on the site or via DM on Twitter or LinkedIn. Curating 1000 360s on YouTube When 2019 began, I decided that for a new challenge I would launch a YouTube channel. After an initial flurry of videos I soon found myself unable to maintain a consistent stream of content and still work my job, spend time with my family, run VirtualiTeach and host #CPDinVR. Though my own content is now back to being video clips to embed on posts here on the site, one project I coordinated proved incredibly popular. I curated 500 unique 360° videos into subject-specific playlists. When I shared this, the response was so good, I kept going and soon hit 800. At this point someone challenged me on Twitter to go for 1000. So I did. You can find them all here: Contributing to other AR/VR projects In 2019 I had the genuine honour of contributing to various AR/VR-related projects including podcasts, guest articles, white papers and research projects. Since I can never find the time to actually write my own book, I especially cherished the opportunity to help proof-read Amanda Fox’s excellent TeachingLand and provide a short case study for the upcoming Reality Bytes from Christine Lion-Bailey, Jesse Lubinsky and Micah Shippee. Amazon links to both are below – TeachingLand on Amazon Reality Bytes on Amazon Chris Long’s Virtual Memorial Without a doubt one of the lowest points of 2019 for me was the passing of my dear friend Chris Long who died suddenly in April. Chris was such a wonderful guy and was with me from the very first #CPDinVR event. When myself, Chris Madsen and Mike Armstrong decided to host a memorial event for Chris inside virtual reality, we had no idea that this was the first time something like this had taken place and I was quoted on VR Scout at the time that it was a milestone I took no pleasure in claiming. That being said, I know Chris would have absolutely loved the idea himself and I his spirit infused the entire event. You can watch an edited recording of the memorial below. Rest in peace my friend. World VR Day #CPDinVR event After Chris’s passing, I fell apart both emotionally and professionally for a long time and one casualty of this was #CPDinVR as I stopped hosting events for several months (even missing a huge 2 year anniversary event we had begun planning.) #CPDinVR returned in October and then in November for World VR Day we made up for the missed anniversary show by putting something special together. We went for four hours straight with a host of special guests from across the globe across eight different sessions. It was exhausting but heaps of fun (especially with all the costume changes). It was also the first time we had livestreamed a #CPDinVR event and not only was it live on YouTube but it was streamed live into the core World VR Day room inside AltSpace too! Very cool. I had planned to share the full recording as a separate post here on the site but totally forgot so here it is for the first time - Relaunching VirtualiTeach Another thing that fell to the wayside for part of 2019 was this site itself. I covered the reasons behind this already (you can read that here) but it would be remiss of me not to highlight the relaunch as one of my highlights of the year. Being able to refine and redesign the original piece of content I produced for the site - my Model for the Depths of VR - was also a realy highlight for me and an apt piece of content to relaunch with, Now in it’s third year, VirtualiTeach is one of the oldest and most content rich sites dedicated to immersive technology in education and I am proud to keep sharing fresh new content with you all in 2020 and beyond.

This last week has been a busy one for me. Not only did I finally find the time to relaunch the site (and produce half a dozen new pieces of content for it) but I was part of a G20 event hosting AR and VR demos and then delivering the closing keynote sharing insights on VR in Education. As I mentioned in the Rise of the Virtual Phoenix article, announcing the site relaunch, I had to sacrifice some of the old site structure in order to accommodate the changes to the Wix blog tool which the site was essentially built around. Losing the Guest Articles and ViveEDU sections did bother me but I knew the content was still available in amongst the main pool of blog posts. The same was true for my AR/VR Theory section, but with one major exception – the ORIGINAL piece of content here on VirtualiTeach and still the most widely shared and best received piece of content I had ever produced: my Model for the Depths of VR from March 2017 - This was never part of the blog as in the early days of the site, before there even was a Theory section, the model WAS its own section. I knew I couldn’t lose it… but then I looked at it for the first time in well over a year and I realised that it was seriously in need of an update. My understanding of VR as a medium has grown so much in the last two years, both through my own work and the amazing work of people within the industry who inspire me on a daily basis. So I decided to rip it apart and put it back together and then debut it at the G20 event as a part of my keynote. I’ll share the new 2.0 model below and then break down some of the changes and also provide a second graphic with some examples of apps at each level. The first thing that became clear to me was that I needed to change the actual levels of the model. In particular the second level STIMULATION stood out to me as too small a step from the initial level PERCEPTION. So I removed this and was now left with a 3-step model which basically looked like: PERCEPTION (simple 360° media) INTERACTION (adding a simple interaction mechanic – but still 3DOF) IMMERSION (6DOF, room-scale VR experiences) At this point my attention switched to the other end of the table. Having two levels that essentially represented 3DOF experiences and then just one for ALL possible 6DOF experiences seemed wrong. It was unbalanced. Simply put, 6DOF experiences ARE true virtual reality and so I focused on these and explored the possibility of teasing this single level apart into two separate ones – if it made sense. Ultimately I felt that it did make sense. Not all 6DOF experiences are created equal. Some are more guided and lack freedom of interaction. Others are more like tools within a room-scale space. Then there are those experiences which truly transport you to a virtual space. The experiences which make you forget that you are in a classroom or a living room and convince your brain that you are underwater, on the Moon, in Ancient Rome or walking a plank at the top of a high rise tower. You also have the multi-user experiences where the communication and connection with others exacerbates the sense of “being there” even more. These are the most powerful experiences – the ones that create a genuine, emotive and visceral reaction in the user. And with that realisation, it became obvious what my new fourth level was – PRESENCE. From here, rebuilding the graphic was fairly straight forward using this new four-step model of PERCEPTION – INTERACTION – IMMERSION – PRESENCE. I shared initial drafts with some colleagues within the VR education community and feedback was very good with a couple of people suggesting that I include examples of apps at each level. I was a little hesitant to do this as I didn’t wasn’t app names/logos on my graphic (and didn’t have the space anyway) so I decided to curate some examples on a separate graphic which you can find below: So there it is folks. I hope you like this update to the graphic and please do feel free to share it on social media and use it in your own presentations or studies. Will this be the final version of the model? Hard to say. I’ll take another look at it in 2021 maybe…