The Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality Club at Southern Utah University is a place for students and faculty to learn about and experience the possibilities of virtual reality.
The club started in the spring 2023 semester but didn’t grow and become active until this fall. Now, it is a thriving club with a semester’s worth of weekly meetings and several large events under their belt. The club has their own room in Multipurpose Center Room 109, which is fully outfitted for gaming and academia. They have 40 Quest virtual reality headsets for participants to use and lots of other technology, including a valve index and a 3D scanner for content development. This equipment is largely thanks to a grant that the club’s faculty director, Aundrea Frahm, applied for.
The VR/AR Club meets every Wednesday from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.. Every two weeks, they select a new game, either multiplayer or single player, to play together for the next two meetings.
“One of my favorites is mini golf,” said club President Zach Adams. “You can have up to eight people at the same time all playing mini golf together, and you can see everybody’s shots.” Starting in the Spring 2024 semester, the club will have a different professor give a presentation once per month about how their particular class is making use of virtual reality.
Club attendees get to use all of the club’s headsets and other equipment, and the studio’s “student workers” are there to teach people how to use them and to help with any issues. This is a paid position where students help with the planning and operation of both the club and the studio.
Periodically, the club also holds events. “At the very beginning of this semester,” said Adams, “we had an opening social event where we had those four big TVs in the Student Center Living Room reserved, so we had three people at a time playing in VR, and what they were doing was up on those TVs so everybody could see what they were doing, and people could just come and grab pizza and hang out, talk about VR and watch what these people were doing.”
At other events, the club has played Pictionary in Gravity Sketch. Participants drew in 3D while others tried to guess the image. For Halloween, they held a “Five Nights at Freddy’s” VR event.
A large part of the club’s mission is to connect faculty of various disciplines with virtual reality software that could help their students understand class concepts better. In addition to hosting club meetings, the VR studio also provides resources to faculty for their classes and works with students for their academics.
“The main goal of the whole VR studio is trying to show that VR isn’t just for games,” said Adams. “Yeah, it can be used for games, but it’s also a really valuable resource for education in more ways than you might think.”
For instance, the studio works with various human anatomy apps that let students explore all the different parts of the body in virtual reality. Adams described how, with this type of app, students can have the 3D experience of taking apart each piece of the body’s systems without having to go into a cadaver lab. Students have similar experiences working with chemistry in virtual reality, where they can construct and deconstruct molecules on a massive scale, and with costume design, where they can draw in 3D and see what it would look like as a whole.
“Not only is this educational content something that the professors haven’t necessarily really seen before, but it’s also something that they don’t have as easy access to because this educational software is super expensive. The human anatomy ones for example are 500 bucks per license,” said Adams. “A professor can’t really just go buy that to play around with right now, but our studio is really cool because it gives opportunities for them to try out these things since we can use our grant to get the licenses, so we work with the professors for their classes.”
The studio also has a 3D printer, where students can draw a design in a virtual reality space to be created in reality. For example, a costume design project this upcoming spring semester will allow students to design and print ornate crowns.
As of March 2023, the VR/AR Studio puts on an annual conference where about 100 people come to talk about virtual reality, including 30 presenters from various companies and universities around the world. This conference is the first in the Western U.S. that is held specifically for virtual reality and augmented reality, focusing specifically on how these things can be used in higher education.
The next conference will be held March 29-30, 2024 in the Hunter Alumni Center. It will be free for students to attend and a catered lunch will be provided.
“It’s hard to explain just how valuable this stuff can be for students until you’ve seen them do it and heard them talk about how helpful it was for them,” said Adams. “The retention that you can get from virtual reality experiences is amazing. We love having people come and present how they’re trying to help their students with VR, because then it gives us ideas for how we can do that, and we make great connections with other colleges.”
Anyone interested in getting involved with the club or attending their events can find out more on their website or by emailing Adams at vrarstudio@suu.edu or zacharyadams5@suumail.net.
Story: Emily Walters
Photos: Zach Adams
Editor: Chevy Blackburn
news@suunews.net
