ERP020 - VR and Education w Dr. Ray

Welcome to Evolve Radio where we explore the evolution of business and technology. Today on the podcast, I'm joined by Dr. Ray Sue, professor at the University of British Columbia. He's the founder of the virtual reality and augmented reality working group and faculty in residence at the emerging media lab at the UBC. When most people think of virtual reality, they tend to think of video games. And like many of us, Dr. Ray sees the value of VR in the gaming field. But his vision for its impact goes far beyond that. In particular, I wanted to talk to Dr. Ray about his views on VR and AR and its influence in education. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcast from. Also, be sure to check out the web page evolvedmgmt.com/podcast for show notes, links to my guests, and to check out previous episodes. Now, let's get started. With me today is Dr. Ray Sue, who's a professor at the UBC, specializing in virtual reality and augmented reality. Thanks for joining us, Ray. Thanks so much, Todd. Uh, really interesting to have you here. Obviously, uh, you're someone who's spent uh quite a bit of time in the space and uh uh interesting interplay between both uh the professional research as well as the professional development on the commercial side of things. Uh, so I think you'll have a bit more of a unique perspective on the this industry that I think will be enlightening. Maybe we could start, just give me a sense of how you see the evolution of virtual reality in the augmented reality space. I think that the way that I see it developing is in terms of growth of audiences. So, let me tell you about how I got into the space in the first place and where I saw the potential to be. I was teaching at a university and I became incredibly bored. I got the feeling that what it was that we said that we were doing as far as our mission was concerned, educating students and, you know, pushing the boundary as far as knowledge was concerned, um, I got the feeling that there was a gap between what we said that we were doing and what we were actually doing. And so I actually left the university for a few years, um, in order to jump into tech in downtown Vancouver. I joined a tech incubator in which I was developing a startup. And while I was there, I noticed that quite a few of the tech entrepreneurs around me became very excited about something called VR. I wondered to myself, what is this VR thing? And I threw myself into the VR community. I happened to be in the audience when venture capitalists would say, okay, these are the growth areas within VR. This is where we we expect to see larger audiences over the next few years, over the next 20 years. And during the Q&A, I remember there was someone who uh raised their hand and said, what do you see as the sector that will be most disrupted by VR? And the venture capitalist who was on stage said, education. And that just stunned me. I I sat up in my seat and I looked around and I realized that all the people sitting around me were startup engineers. That was the composition of the audience, and I was the only educator in the room as far as I knew. So, that was how I began to ask the question, what exactly is the intersection between virtual reality and education? I spoke to Nancy, who is the head of digital media at the Vancouver Economic Commission, and Nancy said, I know that I'm supposed to be talking to you about digital media. I know that I'm supposed to be talking to you about entertainment and games and those kinds of audiences, but when we're talking about education and virtual reality, that's where you are talking about everyone as far as an audience is concerned. I remember I spoke to Mike, who heads up a major VR news source in town, and I asked him about VR and education. And he said, education is VR's killer app. And that's when I thought to myself, okay, it's clear that there are lots of people who are in industry who are looking towards campus, looking towards education and thinking, this is where the huge audiences are going to be. This is where you're going to hit everybody. This is where the growth is going to be. And I went back to campus and I asked people, okay, so who's interested in VR? And it was mostly crickets, you know, some people said, yeah, some people said, I've heard of this thing, this was a while ago. Um, some people said, oh, I've heard of this thing called VR. And that's when I said, okay, we've got to start the conversation going. That's when I founded the VR AR working group. As it turns out, there were people who were working in VR and AR, but they were often in their silos, you know, they were often in their individual departments and their individual labs, um, which is the way that the university works. It you have people who are specializing in incredibly narrow things, or um, there's no particular incentive to be able to talk to people um across the campus, on the other side of campus, and that's one of the things that I wanted to change. So that's where I see the growth. I see education as playing a very large role in that. Do you find that this is a common theme like that that you have a lot of camaraderie as far as that idea goes? Because from my sense, the as you alluded to, the game industry and entertainment tends to get a lot more fanfare. I would say that when it comes to this technology, a lot of the problems are going to be solved in gaming first. So, if you go to a conference on VR, you may find that, let's say, 80% of the people who are there are invested in gaming. Right. And that is where a lot of the problems are going to be solved. And that's why I think that education, people who are interested in education, if they're interested in technology, um, they also have to keep an eye out on, for example, where the problems are being solved, and in this case, it's gaming. Now, one of the issues with education is that people can have a very narrow view of what counts as education. So, if you hear people talking about gamification, gamification is sometimes used as a putdown, you know, um, it's something that is understood to be non-serious. And I think that that's one of the barriers to being able to see where the cutting edge work is happening, solving problems within this space, within VR, AR, mixed reality. It's going to happen in a so-called non-serious space, but really it's tremendously serious. It has tremendous implications for what's going to happen in education. Now, if we're going to talk about, um, if we're going to talk about education, not just in K-12, and K-12 is is important, if we're not just going to talk about education within, um, industry training, and we're going to talk about something like higher education, which is certainly my wheelhouse. One of the problems I think has to do with collaboration. If you have a company that is very interested in turning to education as a market, do they come up with their brilliant idea as to what they think is going to be an educational need that will serve students and teachers? And then impose that from the outside into the education system, or are they going to collaborate with the educators who are tasked with bringing that technology to the classroom? So, what you have in terms of educators within higher education are people who have been working on their particular fields for decades. You know, they are geologists, they are archeologists, they are social justice professors, they are historians, they are people who have spent decades writing books, collecting their notes on sheets of paper that are crumbling, and maybe they're using a chalkboard, you know? Um, maybe they're using overheads, maybe they're even using PowerPoints. But when you're talking to someone who is an expert at that level, I put that in quotation marks, um, but um someone who is that kind of expert, if you ask them to spend a tremendous amount of time overturning the way that they teach in order to incorporate something that might be actually tremendously effective from the from the point of view of learning outcomes for students, that's actually a bit of a conflict. So, what people from the outside of the higher education needs understand is the incentive system for the people, IE the teachers, who are going to be implementing this in the classroom. And there needs to be much more collaboration, um, not just people imposing ideas from the outside as to how education should work. So maybe let's look at some examples, like what are some practical applications that you've seen or that, you know, groups you're working with are talking about in in education? How does it get deployed and utilized in that in that space kind of currently and maybe some ideas of how you think it could roll out in the future? Sure. So, one of the most exciting departments that I think that is taking on virtual reality at UBC is the Department of Geography. In geography, there is a tremendous emphasis prior to VR and all that on field trips. Field trips are expensive to deliver. They take a lot of labor, they take a lot of cost. Not only that, there are accessibility issues. What happens if students can't travel for whatever reason? Um, or can't um access these field trips, you end up with all sorts of challenges around being able to deliver this thing that is part of the core learning outcome of that discipline. So that's one of the reasons why the Department of Geography, and I'm thinking especially of Lock Brown and um Derek Turner and Gil Green at in the Department of Geography, they're working very hard to be able to bring virtual reality technology to field trips. So imagine virtual field trips in which you're able to experience and share experiences with others, um as to a particular location and perhaps it's even a location that nobody would be able to access. You know, let's say it's in the Arctic, you know, it's like that's very difficult to deliver to your students. And yet that could be part of your field work during the course of the year and you want to communicate what you're doing as a professor, as a researcher, um and otherwise there is no way to communicate that. what occurs to me there is how you would might actually be able to utilize um our ramp up in in data, like from space exploration and doing ground mapping and and all kinds of advanced technologies that give you a ton of data, but then the data is is sort of stale and and static in some way. And if you could then interpret that data and create a virtual model out of it and explore, that uh kind of engages people on a different level, rather than just sort of reading through some graphs and and some some uh feedback from from a system, you actually go there and kind of walk around and understand what the data has told you, but it's then interpreted in a much different way, right? Mhm. I think that data visualization is a tremendously exciting area within virtual reality, augmented reality. I know that this is something that we've been talking about in the virtual reality augmented reality working group, how do we think about data visualization through immersive technology? And when I speak to colleagues who work in finance, they also say that data visualization is a huge problem within finance. Tell me more about that, the the finance, I mean, obviously graphs and things are useful. What what would you be able to get further or deeper on using VR or AR from a financial modeling perspective? So, I'm not sure how, um, how much it's possible for me to say about these conversations. Oh, I see. Yeah. I think that, okay, so what I probably can say is that there is there is a lot of data to make sense of. If you're trying to figure out why a certain stock is falling or why it's risen, and you're looking for some sort of explanatory model. I think that that can be very valuable. It could be worth a lot. And if you're able to see the difference, um, in a palpable, meaningful way, and that allows you to make decisions, because after all, um, if you just have a lot of data, it doesn't necessarily turn into strategy. You can't necessarily turn it into decisions unless you're able to make the leap in meaning. You know, I've got all this data. Now I can turn something from business intelligence into something that is strategy. And decision making, so. I think that that's actually a huge leap and that's something that I think immersive technology could help with. Yeah, definitely. Um, what about the for for me, I think one of the biggest pieces that that I would see being useful is is the just the actual engagement of people. And to get the visualization of something maybe helps with generally people are more visual learners. And I know for for me, I struggled a lot with mathematics and chemistry and and to some extent physics um in school because they seemed abstract and I I was great at biology because I could kind of run a movie in my head and imagine the processes and that was very repeatable and tangible for my brain. But, you know, doing mathematical algorithms or, you know, understanding how chemicals uh interplay, um if I had a a visual of that that, you know, you could actually spin and interact with, that might have helped on that engagement. Is that another area that you see a lot of promise for? Absolutely, and I think that it requires again collaboration with someone who knows what the teaching problems are, what the teaching challenges are within a given subject area. So, let's say something like mathematics, what is really hard to teach students, what challenges do students encounter when they're learning specific fields? I remember talking to a mathematician colleague and saying, what do you think of virtual reality for solving concrete learning problems? And one of the things that she said was, you know what, I think this would really help with topology. And I asked, okay, so tell me more about that problem. And she said, well, when you're talking about being able to manipulate something in space, or just something that um has surfaces and you have this equation that actually represents something that you can understand, if you could see it in front of you and manipulate it, you know, that would be much more, it would be much easier to understand if you could see it in front of you and manipulate it. But when you just see it as an equation, it's very abstract. So, she said, topology would be a great area to be able to solve problems, teaching problems in VR. Here's another one. So, there's a class called organic chemistry, Ochem. I don't know if you took organic chemistry. But organic chemistry is a gateway class for people who are working in health care, people who want to go into the health sciences, want to become scientists. And there's certain things in Ochem that are very difficult to grasp, you know. And students buy these wooden models of molecules, you know, and they attempt to fit them together. I've seen this. Yeah. And it's incredibly antiquated as far as a learning technology is concerned, after all, it's just this wooden model. Um, but what it tries to teach is something that is actually very difficult to grasp in the real world because when you're talking about the level of the molecule, molecules just don't behave like how we understand objects to relate to each other in the in this scale of world. So, if you can have a virtual reality experience in which the laws of the world behave the way that they do at the molecular scale, you could solve a huge problem within Ochem. And in fact, um, in organic chemistry, people pay lots of money for tutors to be able to teach them how to solve this learning problem, how to move past this conceptual barrier. So, from the point of view of being able to provide something that's very targeted to solve a learning challenge, that's another example. Yeah, that's a great one. Actually, because obviously it's a lot easier to understand how things relate if you can touch and move them around. Uh if you're in a room, you can kind of figure your way out because you can see, oh, this is a door and there's a window, but it's in context. So if you have other fields that are a lot a lot more intangible, you put them in context, then it it it feels, I guess, a lot more tangible to the brain and maybe it starts to make a a little more relatable sense, right? The way in which you just put it in terms of it feels more tangible to the brain, just sent chills down my spine. Because I think one of the misconceptions within the university is that we learn just in our heads. Right. I know that there are going to there are people who are able to be more open as far as the ways that people learn, but to be able to feel how things are, to be able to manipulate things with your hands, we're not just walking brains, you know, it's like we come to make sense of the world through the way in which we can feel things, the way that things are tangible, and that does add to the way that we come to know things. We're not just, you know, these brains on slabs. Yeah, I agree. I I don't know, um, maybe to to uh strike a nerve, but do you feel that the there is some uh necessity for um education as we know it to continue to evolve in it in how it's done? Uh we have sort of this old model of of lectures and, you know, people sitting in this room and and hopefully paying attention, taking some notes. Um, but to me it it does feel a bit antiquated. Um, there there's maybe some ways to make some of this uh uh this learning a little more interactive, a little more immersible, and perhaps that really helps to engage people and get them to pay attention more. Is that something that that you guys are looking at as well is is how these these uh technologies could actually change how people learn in the classroom? The short answer is yes. The long answer is that when I was a student, I was actually a terrible student. It's and the reason why was because I was not getting out of my education what I felt was meaningful. You mentioned lectures. I don't know how many lectures I sat through as a student, and I've been through a lot of school. When I look back on it, I have no idea how I was able to sit through that many lectures, and a lot of them were boring. Yeah, I agree. I'd same same experience. Okay, if any of you out there in the audience were bored by your lectures, then let's figure out a way to make them not boring. I'll tell you, I'll tell you what I did do, um, instead of doing what I was supposed to be doing. I played a lot of video games. So, this brings things full circle, why did I, when I was a student and I was supposed to be learning, reading my textbooks and all that kind of stuff, why was I playing a lot of video games? Well, the reason why was because I was I was able to find in video games something about experience that I wasn't getting out of the ways that education was structured. And so when I turned to video games, this was in high school, you know, I I somehow managed to make it through high school, uh my teachers cared about me, you know, but I devoted all my time to video games because I was not getting out of school what I wanted to. When I went to university, I thought that I was supposed to become serious and study serious things. And that's what I did for a very long time. Now, when I got to do my PhD, I realized that there were some folks down the hall who were studying for their academic research, video games. And then that's when I just did a total face palm and I said, wow, I cast aside the thing that I was so fascinated with, the thing that I turned to, um because education was not giving me what felt meaningful, and now here are people who are studying it because of, of course, it impacts so many people's lives for exactly the same reason that it impacted mine. And I think that if there's anything that I can learn from that experience is that in fact, video games does have something to teach us about engagement, about experience, about what it is that people are able to get out of video games that possibly education could learn from. I remember there was a speech given by Obama, um on the occasion of a talk on education, a speech on education, and at the very end, he said, it's time to put down your video game controllers and to pick up your textbooks. And I remember being dumbstruck by that, what exactly is this worldview that makes it so there's so oppositional that you have textbooks on one hand and video game controllers on the other, you know, it's that kind of split, you know, that so divided me, you know, it split me in half when I was going through school. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think the if uh the value of merging these two uh areas is missed, it's such a lost opportunity for future generations. I mean, most people are concerned the fact that we have, you know, the millennial generation being a bit of an ADHD uh generation where it's difficult to keep their attention. Everyone says, you know, if you're doing videos for advertising online, it has to be less than two minutes because then everyone just checks out and moves on. Yet, at the same time, you're saying, I want everyone to sit sit down and spend three hours after school reading a book or reading a textbook, um, whereas, you know, you give them an assignment to go watch a virtual battle, you know, you're studying Napoleon and you want to see, you know, the scale of these battles and how many people were involved and, you know, what the geography of that area looked like and and, you know, watch some of the maybe the presentations or speeches that that some of the politicians gave. You know, a simple thing like like making history tangible is such an amazing opportunity. So I really hope that the this uh is a space that gets a lot of traction and helps to uh uh develop the education for the better and and I agree, these the technologies need to to merge together for that to be successful. Mhm. And I think that in order to do that, because I agree, there is a lot of opportunity within this space. I think that we need to be able to collaborate. And I think that um industry needs to be able to figure out how to work with people who operate under a different incentive system, in other words, university professors and people who have a different incentive system. On the other hand, people who are university professors also need to be open to the idea that in fact, virtual reality, immersive technology, augmented reality can help students learn in a way that isn't abstractable to being brains on slabs. Yeah, agreed. Uh you've mentioned a few times uh VR and AR and mixed reality is is definitely a bit of an emerging term as well. Uh how do you see the interplay or the different use cases for VR versus AR, obviously VR being fully immersive and AR being uh, you know, more a holographic overlay and the the uses for those in education, I imagine would be just as different as they are for commercial purposes as well. Mhm. So, so here's one thing, if you want to put someone in the Roman Colosseum, because you're taking a classics class, then you'd want VR, you know, because you want to separate someone from the mundane reality of the classroom or, you know, their dorm room, and you want to put them inside the Colosseum to see what this other world is like. So yeah, there you can see something like VR being a use case. Now, let's say that you were working with machinery, um and that was what you were taking a course on. Well, if you want something in which you are being guided according to how you're going to use this concrete thing in front of you, you don't want to separate the student from the reality that's right in front of them. Instead, you want to be able to give them useful information that allows them to make sense of it better, you know. Um, I can see different use cases coming out of it, but again, it has to do with very concrete collaboration with people who understand what the teaching problems are within a given subject area. Like if you were talking to a mathematician, they would tell you something about topology, what do I know about topology? Nothing, you know, I'm not a mathematician, um, but I would need to work with a mathematician in order to understand what the specific problem is. Right, so this is uh is this is the sort of the work that you're doing with uh bridging this gap between what we see in commercial industry, what the education space needs and finding sort of a a match to knit together? Exactly. I am a very fancy matchmaker. Awesome. Well, you're doing good work, sir. Well, thank you. Thank you, Todd. All right, um, anything else, any parting wisdom that you'd like to to relate to to the listening audience? Yes. I think that in order to understand the moment in which we find ourselves, we need to think back to the last time that this kind of technology or some kind of technology had this kind of impact on the very way that we see the world. And we could look back to the late 1800s with the invention of film. If you were working on something that was completely unrelated to film, and this was the dawn of film, would you jump on to film and start experimenting along with everyone else and figure out what the future is? Or would you be doing exactly what you've been doing, you know, in the late 1800s? Me, I would like to think that I would jump on to this brand new opportunity to be able to make a huge impact. You know, this is the root of video, you know, it's like this is the root of how we see and know the world now. Um, and this is the kind of moment that we're in with VR. Um, if we don't if we don't jump on the train before the train leaves the station, I think it's a real missed opportunity. And we need to figure out how to connect people who are excited to work on this, um, but until they get together, they won't know how. Right on. Great wisdom, Dr. Ray, thanks for being with us and all the best in the future. Thanks so much, Todd. Please do um say hi if any of you are interested in VR and AR, you can find me at the way of Ray or Dr. Ray.ca. Excellent. We'll get that out there. We'll have uh the links in the show notes and uh check out Dr. Ray, the work that he's doing is really important and uh hope to see some amazing developments out of the UBC and the larger community. Awesome. Thanks so much, Todd. Take care.