National XR Day will be at the University of Twente this year on 3 july 2024, and is organized by SURF, University of Twente and Saxion, also partnering with Npuls and DUTCH.
It is the second edition of National XR Day, again a full day by and for the SURF community on everything that is happening with eXtended Reality for education and research.
We are looking for contributions to the programme, either a presentation, workshop, demo or poster, see below!
The focus of this XR Developer Network meeting is on Responsible XR, and specifically the practical aspects you face or are involved in as a developer. How much time and resources do you spend on responsible XR aspects, such as privacy, accessibility of inclusiveness? Do you think these topics are important? Would you like to be more focused on them within your projects, but don't have the means to do so? Etc.
In the session we will have a presentation on Responsible XR from John Walker (from the team Futures & Values at SURF), followed by a more interactive part where you will discuss this topic with the others present.
During lunch after the meeting you can try some new, or less common XR devices.
Te midden van het snel veranderende onderwijslandschap wordt het Samenwerkingsplatform voor Educatieve Applicaties (SPEA) ontwikkeld als een belofte voor informatiemanagers, docenten en instellingen die op zoek zijn naar een georganiseerde benadering van educatieve technologieën. Vanaf de eerdere proof-of-conceptfase van het project tot de huidige, veelbelovende pilotfase, ontvouwt zich een verhaal van samenwerking, innovatie en kennisdeling binnen het onderwijs.
Shouldn’t you be in school?
25 years ago for some may feel like yesterday, and for others, their first steps on this planet. For education, 25 years has been a long and demanding task of understanding how technologies can quickly transform, disrupt, and re-shape the work our educational institutions.
Iris & Barend welcomed me to work on a project that tried to grasp this transformative period while highlighting notable changes and impact of technologies that changed the educational landscape.
The slides will be available to view at the Onderwijsdagen next week in the future campus exhibition, so please be sure to stop by and remind yourself how much has changed in just a quarter of a century!
Some time ago SURF got their hands on the Augmented Reality device previously shrouded in mystery, the Magic Leap 2. Early in the current XR wave (2014) when the term XR wasn't even a thing yet, Magic Leap got spotlight with the release of a few patents for their new mystery AR device called the Magic Leap; which would add realistic 3D elements to the real world (see marketing video). Magic Leap got the attention of big investors, including even Google and Alibaba, which resulted in US$2.6 billion being invested in their company. Due to these investments and marketing videos showing very convincing visuals the Magic Leap 1 hype went very high, while the device itself was eventually quite a let down when it was finally released in 2018.
To our surprise Magic Leap announced the second iteration of their Magic Leap headset in 2021. The Magic Leap 2, unlike the first iteration, is more geared towards the enterprise market. Shortly after they announced that it would be commercially available from September 2022 onwards, SURF took the opportunity to take the leap and buy one of the devices. SURF then tested out its capabilities and wanted to share the outcome here. This has taken somewhat longer than planned, as will become clearer below.
At the end of March the XR Developer Network organized a brainstorm meeting during the Saxion Reality Check festival. The topic of the meeting was sharing of XR materials between developers working in education and research - what, why, how?
One of the outcomes was that amongst XR developers there clearly is a wish to be able to share different types of content related to XR projects. Or, put differently, more seems to be available and sought after than what is currently shared. This varies from pieces of code to complete applications, as well as insights into how a project approached technical challenges and development, and best practices.
But there are hurdles, including some practical ones, that need to be overcome. Below is a summary of the meeting outcome, which identifies the main aspects and challenges.
We will use this summary as input for the next Developer Network meeting on the topic of sharing XR materials, which is scheduled for 11 October at SURF Utrecht.
See this event page for information on this meeting, including how to register.
Would you like to be involved in XR development topics? Please join the XR Developer Network meetings! Register with the network by sending an e-mail to xr@surf.nl.
Ik ben fan van het boek Wijze Lessen (download het boek gratis). Het boek bevat 12 bouwstenen/principes om effectiever onderwijs te geven. Daarbij heeft Wilfred Rubens (lees hier zijn blog) blogpost geschreven over hoe deze principes met leertechnologie toe te passen zijn. Omdat ik deze principes ook erg relevant zijn voor de TU Delft, heb ik een Engelstalige factsheet gemaakt, met daarbij concrete tips en leeractiviteiten voor docenten. Deze factsheets zijn te downloaden via de website Blending Your Education.
Recentelijk hebben wij, Iris en Barend, vanuit het SURF-project ‘Future Campus’ Californië bezocht voor de ELI-conferentie van EDUCAUSE. Voor wie niet bekend is met EDUCAUSE: het is in essentie de Amerikaanse tegenhanger van SURF, gericht op het bevorderen van het gebruik van IT in het hoger onderwijs. We willen graag de hoogtepunten en onze bevindingen met jullie delen.
It has been almost two weeks and the world of eXtended Reality feels a bit different, ever since Apple entered the XR market by announcing their Vision Pro headset. After years of rumors that such a moment might come, the XR market changed overnight, with an extra vendor the size and standing of Apple and with a corresponding Apple vision, next to major players such as Meta and Pico. After the silent death of the metaverse a few months ago, spurred on by AI taking the world by storm, it seems a feared XR winter has now been avoided.
Expecting a memorable occasion we were watching the WWDC23 keynote at the SURF Amsterdam office with a small group of people, while enjoying pizza and drinks. It took sitting through 80 grueling minutes of other product updates (MacBooks, iOS, Watch, etc) before the star of the show finally appeared.
The pizza might have arrived luke-warm, the Apple Vision Pro headset certainly did not...
In the days directly after WWDC23 there was quite a buzz on social media, and even people normally not that aware of XR developments seemed to have picked up on the Vision Pro news. The launch video on Apple's YouTube channel has 51M views in less than two weeks, the highest of any video on the channel (slightly more than the Apple Watch 8 launch video). As one Twitterer put it: "they may not have the market share but they are taking the mindshare".
So now that the dust has settled a bit and more pieces of news (and rumours) are coming out we wrote down some thoughts on the Vision Pro for a variety of topics, including what we expect it means, if anything, for XR in education and research. For a more in-depth discussion of the Vision Pro specs, features and qualities we'll defer to other sources online, listed at the end.
