The Faculty of Communication hosts an international focus group to analyse the potential of mixed reality in the university academic environment
The activity took place in the framework of the European project 'CloudClass: Low Cost, Mobile, Cloud & Template Based Augmented Reality Studio for Education' that the GEA leads in USC.
Two researchers from the Grupo de Estudos Audiovisuais de la USC, Roi Méndez Fernández and Rocío del Pilar Sosa Fernández, led this international focus group, in coordination with Jim Playfoot (WhiteLoop) and Kateryna Holubinka (Open Universiteit Nederland), in which a dozen members representing the diversity of the USC university community participated: faculty, technical staff and students from doctoral programmes in disciplines as diverse as communication sciences, history, educational sciences, psychology, computer science and chemistry.
Based on examples of use in the different universities that are part of the partnership of this European project, the participants actively discussed the feasibility, interest of use, potential, suitable formats and pedagogical advantages that mixed reality technology, used in virtual television sets, can bring to the university educational environment.
This conference is part of the project `CloudClass: Low Cost, Mobile, Cloud & Template Based Augmented Reality Studio for Education’ (Eureka Eurostars – E115354), which seeks to simplify and improve these technologies for use by non-experts, such as teachers and students in the university environment.
The consortium developing the project has six main components: Brainstorm Multimedia, a Spanish company that develops the extended reality software; Stryme, an Austrian company in charge of taking the execution of the programme to the cloud to simplify its technical requirements; WhiteLoop, a British company that carries out part of the educational consultancy; the Open University of the Netherlands, the academic part in charge of exploring the use of the technology in distance teaching environments; the University of Alicante, where the desktop version of the software is being tested, and the University of Santiago de Compostela, which, using the facilities of the virtual set located in the Faculty of Communication Sciences of the USC, transcends the technocreative limits for the creation of educational content in a professional environment.
The day ended with a visit by the participants to the facilities of the new virtual set located in the Faculty of Communication Sciences, which has just been renovated and will soon become a service accessible to the entire university community.