After trying a Quest headset for about 20 minutes I was hooked.
About seven months ago I left Bellevue College and their XR Lab at about two pm. By seven pm I had spent about 700 bucks on the 512 GB Quest 3 headset. Now I’m an addict…
Well, sort of. I had no experience with VR prior to visiting Bellevue College. I did once have a cardboard “headset” that held my phone. I’m not sure I ever really figured that out. This Quest is on a whole different level.
I am a newbie. I can’t really speak deeply about the hardware or the applications. I am learning. I do often play this amazing game called Contractors Showdown. It is a multi-player shooter game and lots of fun. I have experimented with some other apps and try to balance my interest in playing fun games with looking at more “academic” possibilities. I met with some representatives from an app called Curio XR. You can see the Chemistry environment in the video below. Lots of possibilities there to experience STEM content. Like I said, I am still just playing around.
I have shared the headset with some faculty in our offices and two colleagues have purchased one of their own as a result. It is that kind of amazing.
In a Zoom meeting a while back I shared my experiences with Sundar, a business faculty, and he ended up taking his class down to Bellevue College to spend some time with his students in the lab there. How wonderful! He is all about getting a grant to fund a lab of our own.
I have shared it with two graduate classes. One was in a Technology and Pedagogy class I co-taught with Sunita. Most recently, I shared it in one of Ko’s classes. Here is an image of what I was seeing. One thing to note in the video below, it that the headset is in “passthough.” That means things just exist in the physical room you are in. That is called “mixed reality.” Full VR is where everything you see is machine generated. In the video below, you can see examples of each.
Scene from Human Anatomy VR demonstration for class of graduate students.
I made the video below in the hopes of getting some faculty to come around and see if they might find some use for the devices. It is early in the game with these, at least for me, so a lot of playing is in order.
If you are interested, let me know and we can find a time to test them out.