client: Bellevue College
use case: VR Creation + Collaboration
equipment used: Vizible
WorldViz and Bellevue College teamed up on March 3, 2017 to conduct a "PlanJam" with a group of teachers and students to see if, in the span of a few hours, the group could learn how to use the Vizible Presentation Designer and then create some collaborative VR experiences. This experience was orchestrated with the help of Peter Campbell of xpereal. We were testing a few hypotheses:
1) Teachers and students from a variety of disciplines can learn how to use the Vizible Presentation Designer relatively quickly (given a one-hour tutorial to kickstart their engines).
2) After that, in the span of a few hours participants will be able to actually create compelling VR experiences using the Vizible Presentation Designer.
We were also trying to gather feedback about a few questions:
1) How can the Vizible Presentation Designer be improved from a usability perspective?
2) What existing features in Vizible are most valuable for teachers, students, and instructional designers?
Our hypotheses were tested and, as it turned out, true. Participants decided to break into a few groups to work on different VR experiences collaboratively. The Vizible Presentation Designer allows for this via collaborative editing, and the editor functions much like google documents in that it allows people to work on the same VR creation together simultaneously. After a few hours, there were a few interesting VR experiences that groups were able to show off. Included in the mix was a neat interior design exploration (with Sketchup models) and a scaled dinosaur experience. Because experiences created in Vizible are multi-user, I was able to check some of them out with their creators in VR even though they were in Washington and I was in California.
We closed out the experience with a thorough debrief where we got the chance to ask questions to the participants about the PlanJam. For many, this was their first time dealing with VR at all and they were astonished that compelling VR creation was now at their fingertips without the need for any programming skills. We gathered good feedback on how we can improve the 3D model importing workflow, and also a few other aspects of the layout of the Vizible Presentation Designer.
We'll be using this feedback to continue improving the Vizible Presentation Designer for teachers, students, and instructional designers. Feel free to check out this blog post on using Vizible as an instructional design tool for more ideas. If you're in the education space and want to try Vizible or hold a similar event for your faculty or students, shoot a note to sales@worldviz.com.
