Virtual Reality in real life

As part of my efforts to connect the CSU to promising innovations in Virtual Reality, I recently had the chance to visit the founder of Embodied Labs, Carrie Shaw. She and two of start-up team Ryan Lebar and Thomas Leahy have just relocated to Los Angeles from Chicago, living in a house on the west side of LA and quickly acclimating to the California lifestyle.

Embodied Labs taking a break to enjoy LA

Embodied Labs was developed to use VR to build empathy by putting a person in the "body" of another person so you can see the world as they do. Carrie was motivated by the personal experience of seeing caretakers for her mother - who has Alzheimer's Disease - have trouble understanding how she sees the world. Among other problems, her mother has a visual deficit that makes her blind to objects on the left side. Using clear lenses and tape, Carrie developed a simple tool that she found to be effective for helping new caretakers better understand her mother's needs and to enable them to provide better care.

Carrie modeling her DIY VR

Embodied has completed one immersive piece - you can see a 2D version on YouTube but it's much more powerful and realistic in the 3D VR version which is very well-produced. Embodied has a several more simulations at various places in their production pipeline, and is building an interesting platform with a smooth user experience that has potential to provide experiences in a number of different areas.

One of the questions that comes up over and over again is "does VR really make a difference?" Embodied Labs created an experimental design to measure the impact of a pilot at University of Illinois - Chicago, as described in this whitepaper.  They are currently undertaking additional pilots while they simultaneously develop new materials. They have also developed a standardized equipment list which I thought might be useful in other contexts as well - you can find it here. If  any CSU campuses are interested in their approach or would like to explore the possibility of a pilot, I would be glad to connect you.

Focus on Campus Innovation: Minigrants

In May, we announced the availability of $10,000 grants to support campus innovation, and early in June we released the list of nine proposals that have been funded for Fall 2017. We received more than 30 proposals from IT and Academic Technology Staff, as well as from faculty. Innovation areas included improving the student experience, exploring virtual reality, and improving the efficiency of technology deployment and support.

Congratulations to all the minigrant recipients! We will be looking forward with anticipation to see what they can accomplish over the next six months.

• Mihaela Popescu, San Bernardino: Supporting Faculty-Student Collaboration for Producing Engaging Virtual Reality Instructional Content
• Ben Quillian, Northridge: DIY Technology Support Using Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Amir Dabirian, Fullerton: Titanium Engagement (Moodle Dashboard)
• Jennifer Redd, San Jose: Supporting Faculty Exploration of Virtual and Augmented Reality
• Peter F. Young, San Jose: Diving Deeper into the Story... Much deeper than just 360 degrees
• Ranjit Philip, Northridge: Technology Services to Support Academic Research using AWS Institutional Framework
• Orlando Leon, Fresno: Mobile Student Intranet
• Teresa Macklin, San Marcos: On-Demand System Provisioning
• Srikanth Danapal, San Francisco: Natural Language Processing Artificial Intelligence Chabot

ITAC Survey Results - (part two of two)

The web site for CSU Innovate includes four areas of focus:

• Redesigning the Student Experience
• Cloud Migration
• Visual Interface
• Collaboration at a Distance

Of these areas, the first two areas generated the most consistent interest levels from the respondents - a mean of 4.3/5 for student experience and 4.5/5 for cloud migration. The later two areas, while of interest to many ITAC members, had significantly lower means (3.3/5 for both). 

As shown here, the topic interest for the Student Experience focus was quite scattered.

However, the cloud migration area elicited a clear interest in the development of cloud architectures. 

When asked to "Define innovation in the context of CSU technology in one or two sentences", answers included:

Clearly, there's a lot of opportunity here. Thanks to everyone who offered their thoughts. Keep them coming! A summary of the full survey results can be found at this link:

CSU Innovate Survey Analytics

ITAC Survey Results - (part one of two)

Word cloud from the "additional comments" section of the survey, produced using voyant-tools,org

In March I surveyed ITAC (the IT leaders from the 23 CSU campuses) to solicit their guidance on the goals and tactics they would like to see employed to promote innovation in the CSU. IT leaders or their designees from 13 of the campuses completed the survey.

First, I asked them about time horizons. Overall, the preference was for a fairly near-term focus as shown here.

I was a bit surprised by this, as one usually thinks of innovation looking further into the future, but clearly a lot of campuses are looking at help thinking about the changes they need to make in the next two years. However, while the consensus on time horizon is skewed towards the near-term, the tolerance for risk in innovation was moderately high

I next asked the campus leaders how willing they would be to invest their own campus resources in innovation efforts. Given how challenging it can be to find resources on a CSU campus, I was very encouraged by the response.

Not surprisingly, nearly all campuses were interested in participating if additional resources could be provided centrally.

Next I asked about the potential areas for innovation focus. I've outlined these previously on the Cal State Innovate web site. I'll discuss these responses in my next blog post.

Welcome to the Cal State Innovate Blog!