Virtual and Augmented Reality Tech Get Real-World Use At NJIT MIXR Lab
An augmented and virtual reality educational game developed by the NJIT MIXR Laboratory, which is a dual project of the Ying Wu College of Computing and Hillier College of Architecture and Design, is being showcased at an important conference in Silicon Valley this month.
The software is being demonstrated at Oculus Connect and highlights that company's latest headset while teaching children about computational logic and binary math. Informatics professor Eric Nersesian and Jessica Ross of the design department jointly lead the project along with other faculty and students from both schools.
Nersesian joined NJIT three years ago to help build the laboratory. Its name alludes to the mixture of augmented reality, virtual reality and innovations yet to happen. That already includes artificial intelligence, and it all relies on art and design programmed through the Unity creation engine and Microsoft's C# language, and various content creation packages, he explained. Facebook-owned Oculus supplies the headsets plus phones enabled with augmented reality input, he said.
The demonstration is an immersive experience called C-Spresso. Players walk station-to-station through a virtual world to help an intersteller egg timer character -- Eggbert, or Eggy for short -- repair his craft to once again travel the galaxy and return home. Tasks involve pulling virtual levers to turn equipment on and off, which also displays a zero or one. Parts of the game involves working with up to three bits simultaneously to complete the mission. Without knowing it, children are learning how binary digits represent circuits being turned on or off, which is a stepping stone to learning octal math. (Octal is a base-eight number system where you count from 0 to 7 before expanding to a tens unit, as compared to decimal where you count from 0 to 9. Octal is expressed in binary as a rightmost ones column, middle twos column and leftmost fours column. It's a precious and relatively simple skill for students to learn before one expanding their computer science curriculum with hexadecimal assembly language programming.)
While virtual reality lives entirely on screens or inside headsets, augmented reality combines virtual elements with real-world objects. C-Spresso has an augmented reality version, which is a children's book where readers use their phone cameras to capture printed content and make it come alive in a mobile application.
Oculus invited Nersesian as a way to demonstrate the role of their products in education. He will also speak about the results of previous experiments, and he'll join a panel discussion to explain a virtual reality project for the Elizabeth, N.J. school system. The panel includes representatives from Facebook and the Seattle school district.
The MIXR laboratory serves NJIT in many other ways. Nersesian said architecture students made virtual fly-throughs of new buildings and there were visualizations made for the Newark water system. MIXR also helped the New Jersey Department of Transportation study potential improvements to an accident-prone intersection in Passaic County, and helped Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation develop new therapies for stroke victims to gain back their motor skills. Other examples include studying local business clusters and virtual medical education, he said. A related project that he worked on before MIXR opened was a game to help children with serious vision problems strengthen their eye muscles by focusing on virtual targets.
Nersesian said the next big thing will be augmented reality eyeglasses. Google Glass was an early version of this, and plenty of startups all hope to make the primetime, but he expects Apple and Facebook to lead the way in 2020. Apple's telltale signs can be found in the parts they selected for the latest round of iPhones and job advertisements, while Facebook already discussed the technology in public, he said. Applications could include arrows in the lens for GPS navigation, restaurant reviews that pop up as you pass storefronts, and prompts for giving a speech or remembering someone's name, he added.
"Virtual reality's been around for 40 years in the labs, one way or another," Nersesian said. Still, he said, it's important to keep touch with actual reality. He advises taking breaks away from digital screens every 30 minutes and said he does plenty of work the analog way using a pen and paper.