On June 14th MEE’s resident extended reality (XR) Champion Dr Krys Bangert attended Meta’s Innovation day at Brock St, London. The invite to this event was offered as a result of collaborative work between Multidisciplinary Engineering Education (MEE) and a Meta team working to expand and manage the Meta Quest headsets used for undergraduate teaching within the department. This post is part of the CEE Elevate blog takeover.
XR is a label commonly used to categorise many different types of immersive technologies and concepts. Within this field, there is a range of different specialist areas of study, including; Virtual Reality (VR), a technology that creates interactive virtual environments, Augmented Reality (AR), a technology that superimposes virtual information as an overlay on the physical world and Mixed Reality (MR), that combines elements of the previous two within a single display. MEE has recently invested in 20 of Meta’s newest headset, the Quest 3 for use with teaching in the department. Working alongside fellow “XR Champion” Edward Browncross, Krys has been developing bespoke VR/AR digital twins of laboratory equipment to enhance prelab learning experiences and expand the Structures Laboratory capacity to provide teaching sessions (see recent research papers at SEFI).
The event consisted of a series of presentations by influential Meta hardware users and commercial partners discussing their current projects, use cases, and best practices for adopting & scaling XR technology within business and education. This was followed by many different XR demonstrations and networking.
The first session was focussed on industry solutions and experiences with speakers: Paul Jones (VP, Technology Strategist for Life Sciences at Immerse), Phil Moore (Digital Innovation Lead at Insight), Alex Karim (AI Architect & Strategic Advisor at Microsoft), James Temple (Global XR/Spatial Lead & Global Gen AI Creative Lead at Accenture Song) and Amone Gbedemah (Head of Enterprise Sales EMEA, Reality Labs).
Many of the issues discussed revolved around the lack of a coherent software ecosystem for XR in recent years and how this problem is now starting to be addressed and at scale in partnership with Meta. In particular the solutions provided by the team at Immerse were very relevant to mass teaching, as their software platform could act as a go between Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) such as Blackboard and custom Unity XR programs to perform quizzes and analytics.
The second session was centred around commercial and educational solutions with speakers: Torben Lundberg (CIO at Inspired Education Group), Anne Barré (Learning Experience Designer & VR Product Owner at GSK) and Matt Tomlinson (Extended Reality & Metaverse Lead (R&D) at Mondelēz International).
Anne Barré’s talk on the implementation of VR in staff training at GSK was interesting on a number of levels. Not only have they scaled up XR training across all of Europe for their staff, but they have also developed a library of programs to teach the fundamentals of health and safety, laboratory procedures (such as aseptic technique, with hand tracking).
Torben Lundberg’s talk was all about how his company, Inspired, had brought virtual laboratory experiments to school children across an entire country. This involved creating a metaverse library of experiments that many schools now used to facilitate teaching that could not be done using traditional methods due to lack of funding or social deprivation. Interestingly, this curriculum and its impact had been studied and optimised analytically as live data on the students' learning performance was captured across all of the schools. This big data approach had been proven to be highly effective and showed the students overall grades increased with a VR intervention versus a standard benchmark.
Krys’s experience
Following the talks I had the opportunity to try a number of different XR experiences, ranging from building a house with the “talespin” app, have a metaverse Microsoft Teams meeting with “Mesh” and a live demo of Immerse’s software and management tool. I even got to try Meta’s Ray Ban enhanced sunglasses. However, the most potentially useful aspect was making a few contacts with some of the developers and teams down there, which I hope may bear fruit for the department's XR aspirations long term. It was a had a great time and it was good to experience something very different.
XR is a label commonly used to categorise many different types of immersive technologies and concepts. Within this field, there is a range of different specialist areas of study, including; Virtual Reality (VR), a technology that creates interactive virtual environments, Augmented Reality (AR), a technology that superimposes virtual information as an overlay on the physical world and Mixed Reality (MR), that combines elements of the previous two within a single display. MEE has recently invested in 20 of Meta’s newest headset, the Quest 3 for use with teaching in the department. Working alongside fellow “XR Champion” Edward Browncross, Krys has been developing bespoke VR/AR digital twins of laboratory equipment to enhance prelab learning experiences and expand the Structures Laboratory capacity to provide teaching sessions (see recent research papers at SEFI).
The event consisted of a series of presentations by influential Meta hardware users and commercial partners discussing their current projects, use cases, and best practices for adopting & scaling XR technology within business and education. This was followed by many different XR demonstrations and networking.
The first session was focussed on industry solutions and experiences with speakers: Paul Jones (VP, Technology Strategist for Life Sciences at Immerse), Phil Moore (Digital Innovation Lead at Insight), Alex Karim (AI Architect & Strategic Advisor at Microsoft), James Temple (Global XR/Spatial Lead & Global Gen AI Creative Lead at Accenture Song) and Amone Gbedemah (Head of Enterprise Sales EMEA, Reality Labs).
Many of the issues discussed revolved around the lack of a coherent software ecosystem for XR in recent years and how this problem is now starting to be addressed and at scale in partnership with Meta. In particular the solutions provided by the team at Immerse were very relevant to mass teaching, as their software platform could act as a go between Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) such as Blackboard and custom Unity XR programs to perform quizzes and analytics.
The second session was centred around commercial and educational solutions with speakers: Torben Lundberg (CIO at Inspired Education Group), Anne Barré (Learning Experience Designer & VR Product Owner at GSK) and Matt Tomlinson (Extended Reality & Metaverse Lead (R&D) at Mondelēz International).
Anne Barré’s talk on the implementation of VR in staff training at GSK was interesting on a number of levels. Not only have they scaled up XR training across all of Europe for their staff, but they have also developed a library of programs to teach the fundamentals of health and safety, laboratory procedures (such as aseptic technique, with hand tracking).
Torben Lundberg’s talk was all about how his company, Inspired, had brought virtual laboratory experiments to school children across an entire country. This involved creating a metaverse library of experiments that many schools now used to facilitate teaching that could not be done using traditional methods due to lack of funding or social deprivation. Interestingly, this curriculum and its impact had been studied and optimised analytically as live data on the students' learning performance was captured across all of the schools. This big data approach had been proven to be highly effective and showed the students overall grades increased with a VR intervention versus a standard benchmark.
Krys’s experience
Following the talks I had the opportunity to try a number of different XR experiences, ranging from building a house with the “talespin” app, have a metaverse Microsoft Teams meeting with “Mesh” and a live demo of Immerse’s software and management tool. I even got to try Meta’s Ray Ban enhanced sunglasses. However, the most potentially useful aspect was making a few contacts with some of the developers and teams down there, which I hope may bear fruit for the department's XR aspirations long term. It was a had a great time and it was good to experience something very different.