You can grasp everything big and small in the venture capital circle
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"The achievements of technology do not stop there."
Author / Du Chen
Edited / Vicky Xiao
At the end of October this year, Facebook, the top technology company in Silicon Valley, announced that it would change its name to Meta, making the etymology of the new name " metaverse " suddenly become the hottest new concept in the entire technology industry.
For a time, all kinds of "tide-making" behaviors rose and fell. Some people have come out of the "first book" of the metaverse, some people have become the "top analysts" of the metaverse, some people are already selling paid courses on the knowledge of the metacosm...
Even Stanford University has launched a course with a special metaversic "flavor" this semester:
The course is numbered COMM166/266 and is titled Virtual Man, and students can wear VR headsets in their dorm rooms or anywhere in the world and take classes remotely. At most, nearly 300 students may be present in the same virtual "classroom" at the same time.
These classes may be a virtual museum, or they may be more lifelike scenes, or the least visited corners on the planet, such as volcanic craters and submarine reefs. According to the course schedule, the total number of hours that all students complete in VR together this year will exceed 3300 hours...
What's more, COMM166/266 became the first course in Stanford history to be conducted entirely in VR.
Jeremy Bailenson, a professor of communication at Stanford University, said: "In this class, students don't occasionally play with VR. In fact, VR will be the cornerstone of our lesson. ”
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Almost 20 years of old class, this time has a new meaning
Professor Bailenson is also the initiator and director of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL). He has been teaching Virtual Man at Stanford University since 2003.
According to Bailenson, Virtual Man is Stanford University's "flagship course" on VR technology. For the first time, the students completed the course entirely in a VR environment. This year, they can finally play a real "virtual person" in a real virtual space...
"No one has ever organized hundreds of students to wear VR headsets together for months and travel in a virtual space. As far as I know, in virtual reality, in the history of education, there has never been such a thing," Bailenson said.
"In other schools, there may be a class where a dozen people use VR together. In our class, we will reach hundreds of people, and we will spend more than half of our time in VR. In this class, we're going to push the boundaries of scale for VR experiences. ”
VR is becoming more and more popular, according to statistics, the number of VR device systems in use, in the United States alone, more than 10 million units.
The COMM166/266 curriculum will allow students to gain a deeper understanding of VR, a technology that will soon become mainstream with the popularity of the metaverse, from a variety of different perspectives such as popular culture, engineering, behavioral science, and communication science.
The VR scenes you will use in the class are also diverse.
There are museums:
Image source: VHIL
There are laboratories where students can do experiments together in a virtual space:
There are "virtual reality" field trips where students can watch the coral reefs on the seabed gradually being destroyed by human activities through 360° panoramic videos:
You can also take physical education classes in a virtual environment...
Spaces created by students themselves in VR:
Many Stanford students have enrolled in this course this year. The 263 students selected were from economics, communication studies, anthropology, computing, comparative literature, psychology, sociology, political science, etc., with a very high diversity of departments.
What's more, every student selected for COMM166/266 will receive an Oculus Quest 2 headset and matching dual handles on the Stanford campus. For those students who are not local, the school will also send them the equipment:
The design of the course is interesting: it emphasizes learning from the practice, requiring students to experience and participate more in VR scenes, and even design their own scenes. At the heart of this lesson is to enable students to experience things that could only be learned in books in a new, virtual, interactive environment.
For example, when we talk about racial discrimination, no matter how much the teacher explains it, it is difficult for a white-skinned person to actually appreciate the discrimination that people of color experience on a daily basis. In the COMM166/266 curriculum, there is such a class, and the scene was jointly designed by Stanford University VHIL and Professor Courtney Cogburn, professor of sociology at Columbia University.
The lesson, called "1000 Cut Journey," was previously featured as a VR immersive experience that was a big hit at the Tribeca Film Festival. In this lesson, students play a man named Michael Sterling, who experiences first-hand the various acts of racial discrimination he has experienced since he was a child.
It is to let students play a black person in a virtual space and experience first-hand the various kinds of discrimination that a black person suffers in his daily work and life.
Allison Lettiere, a computer science student, said that before that, his stereotype of VR was that it could only be used to play games. After taking this class, she found that VR is also well suited to create a more immersive experience and help people build empathy, which is very important for the technical accessibility direction she focuses on.
Hana Tadesse, a graduating student next year, also spoke highly of COMM166/266: "Hands-on experience is the best way to learn about things, and this class really does that." ”
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In the beginning, in order to cope with the epidemic, VR classes have now become a stepping stone to the meta-universe
VR hardware has been part of virtual people since it was founded at Stanford University in 2003, but in the past, demonstrations were typically conducted by teaching assistants and student volunteers, and the number of people used at the same time, and the scale of the VR space shared by multiple people, has never been as large as it is today.
Last year, however, the COVID-19 pandemic struck suddenly. Like many universities in the United States, all of Stanford's courses have to be taught remotely.
COVID-19 has brought challenges as well as opportunities. Professor Bailenson realized that although the pandemic had prevented students from meeting in physical space, the VR technology he had been researching for decades could bring them back together in the pandemic era.
"What's more, after more than a year of remote teaching, people have really had enough of Zoom," the professor said, adding that with VR technology, people have finally "broken" Zoom's grid and tried a lot of things that are completely different and very exciting than in the past.
(Professor Bailenson's lab has also published research on Zoom fatigue.)
To further create a highly interactive classroom experience, COMM166/266's teaching assistants also organize frequent group discussions. Students stand together in a virtual space through VR avatars —an experience that introduces spatial dimensions (though still virtual) and is easier to engage with and less fatigue than students' previous experiences of attending classes and meetings in Zoom.
Although Zoom is still open in class, you can also see how happy everyone is playing in VR Image source: VHIL
The class is already in full swing at Stanford University, and its popularity mirrors how fashionable the "metacosm" is today in silicon valley tech outside of Stanford. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, Facebook, a pillar-level company in Silicon Valley, even changed its name to prove its determination to "all in" the metaverse.
"Our lesson is the metaverse," Bailenson says, "and this lesson is the standard paradigm for building a metacosm, our lesson covers hardware, software, content, and people, and our goal is to build persistent spaces and scenes full of virtual people and actually use them to achieve [teaching] goals." ”
Professor Jeremy Bailenson
The professor's longer-term goal is to let students become familiar with VR as soon as possible and more deeply, after all, it has laid the status as one of the core technologies of the metaverse and will become a key communication tool and carrier in the future metaverse era.
In Professor Bailenson's view, for VR technology, today may also be a key point in time to determine the direction of technology in the next few decades. At this moment, let Stanford students understand, familiarize themselves with, and master VR technology — and then they can continue the path of innovation in Silicon Valley and use VR technology to promote technological progress.
"From the beginning of the 21st century, to today, VR has made great progress. I believe that in the hands of Stanford students, it will continue to bear fruit. Professor Bailenson said.
Note: The cover image is from Ula Lucas for Stanford Daily and the copyright belongs to the original author. If you do not agree to use, please contact us as soon as possible and we will delete it immediately.
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