Virtual Reality At Bowdoin College

 

Friday started out like a lot of days.  Then I put on an Oculus Rift, delivered by a design and production team I’ve invited to share their early findings with immersive storytelling in Virtual Reality.  I’m no longer in the Digital Media Lab at Bowdoin College with inquisitive students and faculty.  And I’m certainly not in the VR of the 80’s and 90’s.  Now I’m alone in a large Roman hall, maybe in a different century.  Overhead, a dome.  To my right and left, sculpted columns.   I take a baby step into a vivid and believable space, but that’s as far as I can walk while attached to a laptop.  For now.  The designer Kharis, who along with producer Bruce and the CEO Tina form a small company called Global Mechanics in Vancouver, tells me that the awkward cables will be gone within months.  He points out that the Oculus Rift is really just a smartphone on its edge in a box.  The team also takes pains to show that the frontier here is not hardware.  The headset just gets you in the door.  Then you are in the wilderness of designing experiences and stories.  You are in a place of risk and unknowns.  I think of the ocean and ask the question that propelled me to invite this team here in the first place:  what have you found out about Virtual Reality and the Ocean?  Well, in the course of completing an educational project about the ocean, they’ve found that VR is particularly faithful to the experience of being underwater: fewer constraints, muffled audio, light from above, and no rectangles.  Apparently the cable (and the airhose?) will soon be gone too.  Hmmmmm.

 

Having been involved with the launch of a new experiential and storytelling formats over the years, I know that days like Friday often lead to reflective weekends and a whole raft of future Mondays, each loaded up with new creative opportunities.  The military, video gamers, and Facebook have all made big bets on VR.  I think it wise to see how education and ocean conservation can be ready for a new set of diving gear.  More later… maybe from Benjamin Cavalier at Academic Consulting, who made this introduction possible.  Thanks, Benjamin and Global Mechanics!

 

For two days a week and an occasional friday, David Conover is exploring digital media and the ocean with his students at Bowdoin College, where he is the Coastal Studies Scholar and teaching a course called Seashore Digital Diaries.