CSUSB Magazine
Depiction of student transitioning into a virtual world
A Standing Ovation. An Experience of a Lifetime.
by Amanda Mattox
When the Cal State San Bernardino orchestra members discovered they would be performing on a world-renowned stage for their first-ever international concert, the excitement, for many, was hard to contain.

“I was so excited to learn I was performing in Korea!” said Kaylah Wright-Soler, a fourth-year trombone player majoring in music education. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to perform with my friends on the other side of the world!”

“When I heard I would be performing in Korea I was instantly ecstatic to not only perform, but to visit and tour a foreign country,” said Tyler Veazey, a senior timpani player majoring in music technology.

For many, such as Ricardo Arriaga, a fifth-year, first-generation student, that enthusiasm was also met with nervousness.

“I’ve never been out of the country, so this was a big deal for me,” said Arriaga, a bassoon player majoring in music education.
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EXPANDING LEARNING EXPERIENCES THROUGH EXTENDED REALITY by Amanda Mattox

Imagine studying the inside of an active volcano without ever physically immersing yourself into one. The rich learning opportunities are at your fingertips, but the risk of danger is absent.  How is this done exactly? Through “extended reality,” also known as XR, and Cal State San Bernardino is at the forefront of this cutting-edge technology.  “Our campus has a well-developed lab capable of designing and creating a wide range of XR learning experiences,” said Mihaela Popescu, professor of communication studies and co-founder of CSUSB’s Extended Reality for Learning (xREAL) Lab, which is housed in the Academic Technologies & Innovation (ATI) department in Information Technologies Services.

XR, which refers to all technologies that involve computer-generated environments that reproduce the experience of embodiment, can be used across a number of disciplines.
“What that means is that, by nurturing the collaboration between faculty and students in the creation of content, we help not only embody the pedagogical vision of our faculty, but also teach the students working in the lab both the hard and the soft skills they need to become competitive in the marketplace,” Popescu said. Scott Vance, student development lead of the lab and lecturer of music – whose students have developed music and sound assets for films, video, computer games and XR environments – agrees.

“The students have learned to work with a wider variety of software in a team coordinated environment,” he said. “Working together to produce well-organized and documented code improves throughput and makes our students more attractive in the outside marketplace.”
CSUSB has been able to create immersive technology opportunities for various fields, including archaeology, nursing and journalism.

According to Popescu, the lab has worked with faculty to create instructional 360-degree videos to bring to life rich environments otherwise inaccessible to students, used the power of 3D modeling and augmented reality (AR) to create virtual labs, and designed full-fledged virtual reality (VR) environments for experiential learning. But what makes CSUSB’s xREAL Lab especially unique are the principles behind its organization. According to Popescu, most XR labs in the CSU system (with some important exceptions) specialize in curating off-the-shelves products.

In contrast, for CSUSB, the intention was not only to create an infrastructure that allows the lab to build XR learning experiences from scratch, but to do so in a project-based learning framework that ensures a student pipeline to the industry.
Through the expertise of Duncan Smith, the programming lead, the xREAL Lab has a valuable mentor/mentee approach with the student programmers, designers and artists, where they are able to “create content that is both engaging and informative.” “It’s an interesting creative experience developing with student assistants,” Smith said. “Often I find that the best ideas come from them; I provide design insight and direction and they follow through with the realization. It’s as if I create the skeleton and then they flesh out the rest.” Smith encourages students to trust their creative vision, to be outspoken and to have a say in the process of every piece of the work, all with the goal of “pursuing a unified vision without losing that individual agency.”

Designing, building and implementing these XR experiences has distinguished CSUSB’s lab, leading to it being featured by Educause, a nonprofit association in the United States whose mission is to advance higher education through the use of information technology. The lab was highlighted during Educause’s 2018 two-day online event, “eXtended Reality (XR): How AR, VR, and MR Are Extending Learning Opportunities,” and in its influential 2020 Horizon Report: Teaching and Learning Edition, which profiles key trends and emerging technologies. The xREAL Lab has done some particularly notable work in virtual reality, a computer-generated immersive environment that users can experience and interact with by means of headsets and controllers.

“Through the efforts of Mihaela Popescu and others at ATI, we have developed a reputation for innovation in virtual reality amongst our CSU colleagues,” Vance said. “Many of the CSU campuses are exploring VR technology in education. We are unique in that we develop our simulations in house. This provides educational goal-specific (with built-in assessment) experiences.” In fact, Vance said the lab has begun looking into developing patents for some of its work.  One of the major projects the lab continues to work on is called “Ambrosia,” a series of fully interactive educational experiences in virtual reality in which students in the Department of Anthropology, with the help of VR headsets and hand-held controllers, learn how to navigate an archeological site, interact with artifacts, and make inferences about their cultural significance. 
The pilot program of Ambrosia took more than a year to develop and was presented at the 2019 spring CSUSB Faculty Showcase by Peter Robertshaw, department chair for philosophy, who created the concept of Ambrosia with Frances Berdan, professor emerita of anthropology. “Our VR team has developed a simulation in which students become members of an archeological survey crew that searches for and records archaeological sites on the mythical island of Ambrosia in the Indian Ocean,” Robertshaw said during the showcase. “Students learn how to conduct archaeological reconnaissance, experience the excitement of discovering sites and interact with the archaeological materials on those sites to answer questions about site formation processes and what can be learned from material culture.”  The students were even able to interact with artificially intelligent avatars with distinct personalities, one of them being an indigenous Ambrosian. 

The project is comprised of students from art, computer sciences, and music who work on programming the environment and its design; an instructional technologist to supervise the programming; an instructional designer to ensure that experience is designed with learning objectives in mind; and a graduate student with content-matter expertise for project management.
“This team composition illustrates beautifully the kind of collaboration that we believe leads to student success,” Popescu said. “Collaborating on producing XR learning environments in the xREAL Lab is a fantastic project-based learning experience for the students working with us.” The project involved a large team of people, Robertshaw said, and the group collectively learned as they moved through the process of creating the simulation.

According to Robertshaw, the team plans on eventually developing 30 to 50 sites on Ambrosia, so students can repeat the simulation without encountering the same experiences.  The lab concept and the work on Ambrosia received the silver award in the category Innovation in Teaching, Learning and/or Accessibility at the Cal State 2019 Tech Conference in San Diego, which recognized excellence and outstanding contributions by CSU campuses, project teams and individuals across several areas. The category recognized integration of new technology in traditional classroom, hybrid, online or technology-assisted courses. 

“We continually strive to provide our students with unique and innovative learning experiences in our lab – experiences they can use in and outside of the classroom,” said Samuel Sudhakar, vice president and chief information officer of Information Technologies Services, when CSUSB received the award. 

Robertshaw also noted that virtual reality simulations, such as Ambrosia, have the potential to provide an alternative to field schools, which are often beyond the financial and logistical reach of many students. “With XR,” Popescu said, “students engage in hands-on experiences that would normally be unavailable or too risky, and visualize how things work.” For CSUSB nursing professor Cheryl Brandt, she recognized her nursing students often faced the challenge of time while learning in a real-life clinical setting. 

“Nursing students are newbies … so they need more time, they need an opportunity to practice – even skills like patient teaching – outside of the patient care environment, which is busy with people coming and going,” she said. “It had been my observation that patient education opportunities in the hospital often had to happen under the time gun, under real time pressure.”

As a result, in 2018, Brandt came up with the concept to teach students how to interact with patients through an immersive virtual reality patient care simulation.  The pilot simulation, which launched in fall 2019, required students to interact with a virtual patient who needed some kind of education before that patient went home, such as directions on how to manage their chronic disease or how to take their medication. The simulated patient’s responses to the students were driven by artificial intelligence technology, like it is with the Ambrosia project, so the students would receive unique responses each time they interacted with them.

While skills such as learning how to properly administer a shot are certainly important, Brandt notes that this nursing simulation, which was carried out by nearly 35 students, focused on the significance of communication and relationship building, including patient education skills. 
“We are always looking for opportunities for them to practice skills before they get into a clinical setting with real patients and actually carry out those skills,” said Brandt, who credits Popescu and her team for bringing her ideas to life.  “What was really fun for me was bringing my expertise, which is clinical – not technical at all – together with their expertise,” she said. “And it shows what an interprofessional team can do.”

Brandt was also impressed with the many student programmers who helped create the simulation and said the whole ATI team was “amazing to work with.”

Although there were some initial glitches, Brandt notes that many of the students who participated in the simulation said the experience was “interesting and fun.” Brandt and the xREAL Lab team plan on improving and continuing the simulation in the future.
Whether building XR simulations from scratch or inviting students to participate in an XR experience, the xREAL Lab provides students with the tools they need to enhance their learning experiences and ultimately their future.  CSUSB alumnus Andre Adame ’19, who graduated with his master’s in communication studies, used the lab to conduct research on immersion virtual reality. His experiences in the xREAL Lab helped lead him to being accepted to the highly competitive doctoral program at University of California, Irvine’s School of Informatics, where he will study the human/computer relationship that promotes engagement and how that can be applied to promoting greater opportunities for learning. “I cannot overstate how incredible it is that CSUSB has a VR Lab with some of the latest equipment readily available for use,” said Adame, who calls the lab a hidden gem at CSUSB.

“The ability to superimpose digital objects over the real environment in a way that allows students to visualize them and interact with them as if they were real could potentially be a game-changer,” she said.

And even through these challenging times, the xREAL Lab team remains committed to helping faculty bring their visions to life.  “By exploring strategic industry and community partnerships and mobile, distributed production,” Popescu said, “we hope to expand our collaborations and the scope of work we are doing in order to assist more faculty in creating a truly phenomenal virtual course experience despite these difficult conditions.”
“My introduction to Dr. Popescu and the VR Lab was really a defining moment in the direction of my research, and I wouldn’t have such amazing opportunities available to me now if not for them.”

While the campus operates remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the lab’s work on fully immersive and fully interactive VR is currently on hold. However, this has given the team the opportunity to focus more of its attention on augmented reality, a way to superimpose computer graphics and information over the physical world so that users could experience this enhanced reality with their mobile devices.

According to Popescu, the team has already started working on projects that aim to recreate the experience of learning in a photo studio or a STEM lab via 3D, interactive digital objects that create a sense of immersion and embodiment for students.