My Hidden Life as a Proponent of VR.

The Metaversity shown below is a project I’ve been involved with for about three years. The project is not just a virtual campus but a virtual classroom, virtual meeting and marketing space and houses six learning and assessment modules for various campus degree programs. The project is massive. It took a team of subject matter experts from multiple degree programs, and spawned two campus committees. One committee to oversee the authenticity of the curriculum materials and one to manage the build-out of the Metaversity and included features. All this takes place at the small rural applied college in Oklahoma I work at. The entire production was handled by our partner in this project, Xalter, a fine group of people that really understand the value of VR and it’s implementation into a learning environment. .

My part on the project is hard to explain. The project would not exist if I hadn’t (accidentally) introduced Xalter to OSUIT. I don’t think the project we ultimately designed and gathered 3.5 million dollars in grants to produce would have found it’s legs with out my cheer-leading. I’ve Co-Chaired the OSUIT VR Committee for the past 3 years. I’ve spent countless hours learning about pipeline safety, compression skids, culinary techniques, place serving templates, heavy Truck engines and a number of other interesting things that are used to produce these modules. However I don’t want to take credit for any of the production, Xalter handled all the production. I think I’m best described as the OSUIT translator of VR to academics, or more precisely, the connection between production and out extremely hard to understand politics and social meanderings on campus.

Ironically, I promised to bring VR and mixed reality to OSUIT in my presentation to get the job as Dean of the School of Creative and Information Technologies. I never thought it would grow to this extent, I also never foresaw the kind of unrest VR would bring to a small rural campus where most would really like to tomorrow to stay the same as today.

So I present to you a few screenshots of the many modules and Virtual University we’ve created.