Virtual Reality Opens Up New Worlds at Bowdoin

Virtual reality is dreamy, thrilling, weird, and exciting, and its potential for research, teaching, making art, 编程正在激发教职员工的好奇心和想象力, students, and staff at Bowdoin. 一位教授已经在他的人类学课堂上使用了虚拟现实技术. A computer science professor is making advances in the field. 今年夏天，一些学生正在编写新的虚拟现实环境.

And IT and library staff at Bowdoin are making it all possible, especially Stephen Houser, Paul Benham, and Carmen Greenlee. Responding to rising interest, 买球平台大学将于今年秋天在哈伯德大厅的地下室开设一个新的虚拟现实实验室.

Bowdoin Students in VR

Matthew Donnelly ’22 是今年夏天获得买球平台奖学金的几个学生之一，他将参与一个虚拟现实项目. With funding from a Gibbons grant, 他正在尽可能多地吸收缅因大学成功的信息, ten-year-old VEMI virtual reality lab in Orono, 是什么让虚拟测试环境适合各个领域的研究人员, from architecture to climate change. With his new expertise, he'll help set up Bowdoin's lab in August.

“对我来说，最重要的是熟悉虚拟现实软件," Donnelly said, so that he can create and tweak virtual reality environments, often called "demos,为那些想在课堂上或研究中使用它们的买球平台教职员工准备的. 

Laura Friel ’22 and Dani Hove ’20 也将获得买球平台基金，在今年夏天开展虚拟现实项目. Friel, like Donnelly, is spending a lot of time this summer at VEMI, 她有一个计算机科学学生奖学金来帮助艾米丽·布莱克伍德, a PhD student, recreate a Peruvian archaeology site. One of their goals is to enable users to experience the 6,000-year-old site from the point of view of its former inhabitants.

Hove, a computer science and math major who is a big fan of virtual reality ("I think it's incredible; I absolutely adore it," he said), 有一个Surdna基金会本科生研究奖学金来研究如何让虚拟现实环境对用户更舒适. 有时在虚拟环境中人们会晕车, especially when their surroundings are moving while their body, stuck back in ordinary reality, remains still. "At minimum, it can be uncomfortable," Hove said. "At maximum, it can cause horrific nausea and vomiting."

让人们轻松进入一个新的虚拟环境，而不会产生令人恶心的副作用, 霍夫正在尝试改变使用者的视野，给大脑足够的线索，让他们知道环境是虚假的，这样“他们的身体就不会有尖叫的反应”, like, "what's happening!?，同时保持了沉浸感和真实感.

Extending Bowdoin's Reality

Stacy Doore他是买球平台大学计算机科学客座助理教授，他把唐纳利、弗雷尔和他的同事联系了起来 Rose Xi ’22 to VEMI this summer. (While Donnelly and Friel are working directly with virtual reality, Xi is working on a natural language processing problem: she's tailoring computers' translation of English into wording that describes scientific images and graphs more precisely and clearly for blind or visually impaired people.) Doore在VEMI完成了她的博士后研究，并担任其研究经理, 所以她很熟悉虚拟现实实验室在研究机构中扮演的角色.

"Virtual reality is an amazing tool for researchers because, with virtual reality, you can manipulate anything in your environment," Doore said. 从心理学和生物工程研究到历史教育学和语言学习, she sees infinite possibilities for the technology at Bowdoin.

In her own work, 多尔正在探索虚拟现实如何帮助有视觉障碍的人设计更好的室内导航系统, 帮助他们在参观之前熟悉室内环境, before they have to navigate the melee of a chaotic airport. “你可以在一个安全的环境中，在虚拟现实中反复进行空间认知实验, adding new elements and complexities," she said. Working in virtual test environments, 包括有视力的参与者和有视力障碍的参与者, 帮助她缩小最有效的自然语言导航和场景描述线索. 

买球平台实验室将拥有虚拟现实的软件和硬件, augmented reality, and 360-degree video (all together, they're often referred to as extended or mixed reality). "They're all distinct," said Bowdoin Humanities and Media Librarian Carmen Greenlee他会咨询有兴趣在课堂上使用这些技术的教师. 想了解更多学者们对虚拟现实在课堂上的应用的看法，请点击 this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.]

Some see biology classes as a natural fit for virtual reality. 学习解剖学的学生可以在人体动脉中穿行，也可以在大脑或肺部内部活动. Donnelly, who is interested in majoring in both biology and computer science, 用虚拟技术尝试了买球平台的一些医疗项目. "You can see all the alveoli, it is so memorable," he said. “我现在可以在脑海中想象，在肺里是什么样子. It's way better than looking at a diagram."

Last semester, Assistant Professor of Anthropology Willi Lempert had his students watch (or rather, 在他的全球本土电影课程中，他体验了扩展现实电影. 其中一些作品受到了本土未来主义运动的启发, a concept first proposed by scholar Grace Dillon. "One idea she talks about is that, for a lot of indigenous people, the apocalypse has already happened, and they live in a postapocalyptic world," Lempert said. In Biidaaban: First Light, 观众在这个起初看似荒凉的城市反乌托邦中穿行，同时听到一只鸟的歌声, at one point, observing a person planting a sapling near pavement.

“观众在整个过程中意识到，它远非反乌托邦，”Lempert说. “这是买球平台土著的未来，并建议自然与城市地区恢复平衡."

课堂上还花时间讨论了如何将扩展现实视为“同理心机器”,“因为你几乎可以站在别人的立场上——也许是当他们在难民营里领取口粮的时候, flee a bombed building in a far-off civil war, or try to cross a sea on a raft.

One of the films Lempert uses in his class Thalu: Dreamtime Is Now 在澳大利亚，当一个矿工被一个土著精神向导引导时，使用者是否寄居在他的身体里. “我们讨论了这个项目的伦理和道德问题，”Lempert说. "If this technology becomes mainstream, and you can experience other people's experiences," does it encourage empathy and compassion? 或者它只是变成了逃避现实的娱乐，就像“身份旅游”一样?" he asked. 

随着每一项新技术进入我们的社会，伦理问题也随之产生. 这类问题是文理学院特别适合解决的, 尤其是随着虚拟现实技术的进步，它变得更加“真实”."