How VR Enhances the Business School Experience
[At MIT Sloan] Students may see their proposals lead to rising sea levels wiping out Shanghai or housing being lost in California and Florida. The climate simulation "teaches our business students skills such as improvising, negotiating and public speaking," he says. In addition, "it reinforces how their decisions can have consequences that last for decades."
The Stanford University Graduate School of Business has committed to virtual reality in its two online Learn, Engage, Accelerate, Disrupt – or LEAD – certificate programs, one in corporate innovation and the other in personal leadership.
Margaret Neale, a Stanford professor, says she is currently working with a company to develop a new virtual negotiation tool to further enhance learning. "Using either their smartphone or computer, students will be able to use a negotiation simulation that reads their facial expressions and offers feedback on how well they did in a simulated job interview," she says. Students will also be able to see an assessment of how they negotiated compared with their peers.
The Rady School of Management at the University of California—San Diego has found similar success using the VirBELA platform as the centerpiece of its global micro-MBA program in partnership with Waseda University in Tokyo.
The timing also coincides with the decision of various Fortune 500 businesses like Honeywell, Walmart, Volkswagen and United Parcel Service to integrate VR into their worker-education programs. As virtual reality tools gain a bigger foothold in more industries, experts say, graduates who have used these technologies as part of their curriculum will be prepared to help take their employers to the next level.
See the full story here: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools/articles/2019-03-28/how-virtual-reality-enhances-the-business-school-experience
Teaching With NYT Virtual Reality Across Subjects
In the following order, they researched:
A. Sharks, skates and cartilaginous fish
B. Bony fish
C. Are dolphins fish?
D. What is a cetacean?
E. Cetaceans and intelligence
F. Dolphin clicks and screeches
The student research created a runway to speak about echolocation. We asked students to demonstrate hearing as a spatial sense by making sounds in different parts of the room while another student tried to locate the sound with eyes closed, pointing in the direction of the sound. As another example, we asked them to click their tongues with their eyes closed.
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“The Displaced” is a virtual reality experience that recognizes the nearly 60 million people who are currently displaced from their homes by war and persecution. Half are children. This NYT VR multimedia journey tells the stories of three children from eastern Ukraine, Syria and Sudan.
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/learning/lesson-plans/teaching-with-nyt-virtual-reality-across-subjects.html
Immersive Digital Experiences Alliance (IDEA) to Create Specifications for Next-Gen Immersive Media, Including Light Field Technology
The Immersive Digital Experiences Alliance (IDEA) will launch at the 2019 NAB Show with the goal of creating a suite of royalty-free specifications that address all immersive media formats, including emerging light field technology. Founding members, including CableLabs®, Light Field Lab Inc, Otoy, and Visby, created IDEA to serve as an alliance of like-minded technology, infrastructure, and creative innovators working to facilitate the development of an end-to-end ecosystem for the capture, distribution, and display of immersive media.
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Comcast to spend $50 million in South Philly to create the nation’s first video gaming arena
Nate Nanzer, commissioner of the 20-team Overwatch League, said there has never been a special-purpose esports arena “built anywhere. This is a huge step for esports. This is something we will see pop up all over the world.”
Besides housing Comcast’s Fusion, one of the Overwatch League’s teams, the venue is planned to be a major east coast hub for gaming events, company executives said.
Next year, the Fusion team will relocate from California to Philadelphia, and compete in temporary venues for a year. Those locations could be the 2300 Arena in South Philadelphia and Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City. The Fusion Arena is expected to open in early 2021.
8th Wall Spins Up New ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ Augmented Reality Experience for Blu-Ray, DVD Release
After webbing up a web-based augmented reality experience to promote the theatrical release of Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse, Sony has ordered a new AR activation from creative agency Igniteie to promote the Blu-ray, DVD, and streaming digital video release of the film.
Like the first version, the new AR promotion runs on the web-based AR toolkit from 8th Wall, which enabled Ignite to bring Spider-man into the real world and give users the ability to capture photos of the web-head, which they can then sell to J. Jonah Jameson.
You can try the experience yourself here by scanning the code on the website with your smartphone or tablet camera (iOS and Android devices work just fine), no app needed.
See the full story here: https://mobile-ar.reality.news/news/8th-wall-spins-up-new-spider-man-into-spider-verse-augmented-reality-experience-for-blu-ray-dvd-release-0195244/
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 Will Have Female, Non-Binary Protagonist Options
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 will let players create a female protagonist or a non-binary character. Publisher Paradox Interactive announced the sequel to the cult classic game last week.
The game becomes one of few titles with non-binary representation. Other games with non-binary player characters or NPCs are the upcoming dating sim, Boyfriend Dungeon and mech combat game, BattleTech.
In Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, you will start off as a newly formed vampire. However, what your vampire looks like is up to you. In an interview with VG247, Hardsuit Labs confirmed that you can choose to play as a male protagonist, a female protagonist, or a non-binary protagonist.
The character customization feature allows you to choose your body type and your pronouns, which will support the decision to create a non-binary player character. Rachel Leiker, a UX/UI designer at Hardsuit said that “we’re interested in providing a very robust roleplaying experience for the player with something were they can really identify with their character by fine tuning and providing lots of options for them to do that.”
What your character looks like isn’t the only choice you get to make in the game. You will also be able to choose what abilities your character has, make story decisions, choose which characters to drain blood from, which clan to ally with, and more.
See the full story here: http://jstationx.com/2019/03/26/vampire-the-masquerade-bloodlines-2-will-have-female-non-binary-protagonist-options/
‘Five-dimensional’ glass discs can store data for up to 13.8 billion years
Scientists from the University of Southampton in the UK have created a new data format that encodes information in tiny nanostructures in glass. A standard-sized disc can store around 360 terabytes of data, with an estimated lifespan of up to 13.8 billion years even at temperatures of 190°C. That's as old as the Universe, and more than three times the age of the Earth.
The method is called five-dimensional data storage, and was first demonstrated in a paper in 2013. Since then, the scientists behind it say they've more or less perfected their technique, and are now looking to move the technology forward and perhaps even commercialize it. "We can encode anything," Aabid Patel, a postgraduate student involved in the research tells The Verge. "We’re not limited to anything — just give us the file and we can print it [onto a disc]."
5D discs, by comparison, store information within their interior using tiny physical structures known as "nanogratings." Much like those bumpy lines in the CDs, these change how light is reflected, but instead of doing so in just two "dimensions," the reflected light encodes five — hence the name. The changes to the light can be read to obtain pieces of information about the nanograting's orientation, the strength of the light it refracts, and its location in space on the x, y, and z axes. These extra dimensions are why 5D discs can store data so densely compared to regular optical discs. A Blu-ray disc can hold up to 128GBs of data (the same as the biggest iPhone), while a 5D disc of the same size could store nearly 3,000 times that: 360 terabytes of information.
See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/16/11018018/5d-data-storage-glass?fbclid=IwAR1zPNidOevVZ6SgG7AzH8-7k39iCnG0zgFdUGykK6EUtvk2VYY31cTBBXg