(aka “Ecampus Mind Set”. aka “Campus at home”) 11/15/2018 – Warren Blyth

Ecampus serves thousands of distance students around the world through web pages. With Magic Leap, we could bring the campus into a person’s house for greater connection to the Ecampus experience. I see three categories we could nail:

ADORN:
* Picture a small Memorial Union top of your monitor, with weather and lighting that reflects the climate in Corvallis (where your teacher and classmates are going through the same materials you’re exploring). Offer up a monument from your neck of the woods, so others can get a taste of your environment even though they’re thousands of miles away.
* Define rooms in your house to correspond with classes you’re taking, so you can literally get up and walk into a different mind set. Chairs and a chalkboard from the actual room where the course is being taught in person, pinned around your dining room. 3D scans of hallway tiles and water fountains mix the reality of OSU campus into the reality of your home.
* You could also adorn your house with trophies from the courses you’ve taken, and other monuments from OSU like a football scoreboard, or award winning research projects from various colleges. As you take year after year of Ecampus courses, your house can be filled with totems and light memories from your journey through the program.

ACTIVITIES:
We can also develop or adapt custom experiences for various classes to further leverage the Magic Leap’s abilities:
1) We have been developing VR applications for several years now, and each one of those has elements that could be delivered though Magic Leap. Setup a scale Soil Pit in your living room if you’re enrolled in SOIL 466. Look around the saddle mountain trailside and learn about forestry debris from FES 430 in your den. Practice public speaking with a virtual audience in your bathroom.
2) We have a dedicated 3D scanning team recording real objects from archives around campus, and this is a way to bring them home. Place hundreds of fish from XXX in your kitchen, or place the skulls from YYY around your garage. These are to scale, and seeing them amidst the parts of your home that you’re deeply familiar with will help your spatial memory and comprehension of that scale.
3) Practice in-class activities that aren’t possible in a web browser. you can walk to a corner, or stand in line with virtual classmates to get a sense of the actual activities some teachers perform (and struggle to deliver through a simple 2D screen).

MERGE:
* A unique benefit of online learning is that you can bring your family and home life into your class without distrupting it. With this app, you can really multi-task by bringing up class materials while eating dinner. Literally place the book (or a virtual web browser window) above your table, and read from it to ask your loved one’s what they think of a very specific question you’re chewing over. While both your hands are free to cut your meat.

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The core idea here is that you already have a laptop or desktop dedicated to your online learning, but Magic Leap lets you take elements out of this small screen to make a part of your house a portal into to the university experience. And it scales so you could:

• clutter up your desk with self-updating 3D sculptures that relay details from OSU-area activities (or bring key files, or other web pages, out of the monitor to enjoy a multi-monitor study experience),
• fill every room in your house with mood setting fun to keep you moving around with your laptop,
• or swap out the adornments in a single room using the magic leap controller – reusing your den where you always go to focus on class work, instead of spreading out.

Your choice. Your Ecampus in house.