Last week and this week, I am officially on holidays from my employer, the University of Manitoba (although I am still beavering away on my presentation on social VR in higher education, which I am scheduled to give on September 8th to the university’s Senate Committee on Academic Computing). No rest for this social VR blogger!
September is going to be a busy month, as classes resume! I am still largely working from home, and all of the training sessions I do this fall for various classes will be conducted via Zoom, Cisco WebEx, or Microsoft Teams. The University of Manitoba still has an on-campus face mask mandate, and recently, they announced that all faculty, staff, students and visitors to campus must be fully vaccinated against COVID (something which I was very happy to hear).
While I have been fully vaccinated for two months now, I have rarely left the safe cocoon of my apartment these past two weeks. Why? Well, for one, the Delta variant is spreading quickly in various parts of the country. I do not want to become a “breakthrough case”, even though I know that the vaccines will protect me against a serious case of COVID-19 if I should become infected. But I don’t feel like tempting fate!
My excursions from my apartment fall into three categories: visiting my mom and stepfather at their seniors life lease condo across town; dinners on outdoor restaurant patios with my best friend; and picking up my online grocery order every two to three weeks from my local Walmart (a habit I expect to keep once the pandemic is over). Other than that, I stay put!
Here in Manitoba, it’s been a dance of two steps forward, one step back. The good news is that over 75% of the province has been fully vaccinated. Unfortunately, due to projections of the spread of the Delta variant, and its potential impact on our healthcare system, Manitoba has had to reimpose restrictions:
The Manitoba government will require all provincial employees who work with vulnerable populations to be fully immunized for COVID-19 by Oct. 31, or undergo regular testing, to protect Manitoba against a fourth COVID-19 wave, Premier Brian Pallister announced today.
In addition, the province will put indoor mask requirements in place across Manitoba in the coming days, including in schools, and will expand the list of activities and services that can only be accessed if an individual is fully immunized.
“These steps are necessary to protect children in Manitoba, avoid another lockdown, and keep our health-care system safe from a fourth wave of COVID-19 and the dangerous delta variant,” said Pallister. “Despite having among the highest rates of vaccination in Canada, children in Manitoba are not yet eligible for the vaccine and we have to take every step we can to protect them from this virus, especially as they prepare to return to the classroom this fall.”
Like I said: two steps forward, one step back. God, I will be so happy when this dance is over! Stay safe and stay healthy, everyone!
LinguaVirtua is a Taiwan-based company offering foreign language classes using the social VR platform Vircadia. (Vircadia is the volunteer-run product founded on the open-source code of the original High Fidelity social VR platform which folded in early 2020.) According to a company blogpost:
We used Vircadia, an open-source VR platform that allows people to build and explore VR worlds, to build a virtual version of our LinguaVirtua meetups. Learn more about Vircadia here: https://vircadia.com/
If you’re interested in learning languages in a fun and informal way, VR is the best option – best of all, you get to meet and socialize with other language learners, right in the comforts of your own home!
I chatted with the organizer via Discord (his name is Ryan, too!), and he told me:
I’m the creator of LinguaVirtua. Currently we’re not holding regular language meetups in Vircadia, but we have been planning to. We have had a few experimental language meetups inworld and they were a lot of fun. We’ve been holding regular events on Discord and I was hoping to get at least a small percentage of our 2,300 Discord members to join our language meetups in Vircadia…
I’ve been hosting offline language meetups for several years across Singapore, Philippines and Taiwan, and since Covid-19 platforms such as Discord and Vircadia have really helped allow us to continue since we couldn’t meet in person. It also gave us an opportunity to become more international as we now have people joining from all over the world.
On overhead view of the LinguaVirtua village in Vircadia
While we wait for LinguaVirtua to relaunch in Vircadia, you might be interested to know that LinguaVirtua also runs an active Discord server with over 2,300 members, featuring both text and voice channels in many different languages.
Another day, another new social VR platform! SapphireXR is a Unity-based social VR platform being built by a company called Freelight Labs.
There’s not a lot to show you yet. The following one-minute YouTube video shows you a bit of the platform and its development tools (warning: loud background music!):
Conducting experiments in VR can sometimes be difficult, involving the purchase and setup of sometimes expensive hardware (particularly if multiple headsets need to be bought). University budgets can only go so far, even at the best of times. One way to get around this is to use existing commercial social VR platforms and their users as volunteers (who, of course, already have their own equipment).
This is a different form of what is called crowdsourcing: dividing up a task among a larger group of volunteers. In this case, researchers at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts did a small demonstration experiment to prove the idea that recruiting study volunteers via VRChat was possible, publishing a paper at a computer science conference held last year. The following research paper is unfortunately not free to access and read, but you can always use your friendly local public or academic library to obtain a copy of it! Here’s the citation:
Saffo, D., Yildirim, C., Di Bartolomeo, S., & Dunne, C. (2020). Crowdsourcing virtual reality experiments using VRChat. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – Proceedings, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3382829
According to the conference paper’s abstract:
Research involving Virtual Reality (VR) headsets is becoming more and more popular. However, scaling VR experiments is challenging as researchers are often limited to using one or a small number of headsets for in-lab studies. One general way to scale experiments is through crowdsourcing so as to have access to a large pool of diverse participants with relatively little expense of time and money. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to crowdsource VR experiments. We demonstrate that it is possible to implement and run crowdsourced VR experiments using a preexisting massively multiplayer online VR social platform—VRChat. Our small (n = 10) demonstration experiment required participants to navigate a maze in VR. Participants searched for two targets then returned to the exit while we captured completion time and position over time. While there are some limitations with using VRChat, overall we have demonstrated a promising approach for running crowdsourced VR experiments.
One of many delightful images illustrating this research paper!
One of the features which attracted the researchers to VRChat was the ability to build custom virtual worlds or rooms:
VRChat also has a special feature that sparked our interest: it allows users to upload custom rooms built with Unity by using a proprietary VRChat SDK. The SDK contains special triggers and event handlers that can be triggered by users, in addition to giving the possibility to upload rooms made of and containing any kind of 3D models made by a creator. We started asking ourselves if we could leverage the vast amount of VRChat users who already own VR equipment and use them as experiment participants by building a custom room that contained the implementation of our experiment, in order to run crowdsourced experiments in VRChat.
And so they built a maze and ran a simple experiment:
The participants in the experiment were asked to run through a VR maze, find two targets inside the maze, and go back to the exit. The experiment was run using two point of views, immersive and non-immersive, and compared the timing between a group of self-declared gamers and non-gamers. Our reasoning for choosing this experiment over others was that it was simple enough to avoid having too many variables influencing the results, and it would give us a quick way to evaluate the process of conducting a user study on the platform.
A researcher would then visit public world in VRChat, asking users present if they would be willing to run the maze.
After joining a public world, we began by looking for users using HMDs. We did this by asking users directly if they were using VR, or by observing their in-game movements as VR users have full head and sometimes hand tracking. We found that most users we approached were willing and eager to participate. After users had joined our world, they would spawn in a waiting room where we could give them further instructions. At this stage researchers conducting a user study may also present digital consent forms for participants to read and sign.
The researchers noted that, at the time of the proof-of-concept experiment, they were somewhat limited by the relatively narrow scope of what they could build using the then-available version of the VRChat SDK (software development kit). However, they noted that the next-generation graphical SDK (called Udon) offered the ability to build more complex interactive worlds, thereby expanding the possible uses for VR experiments.
The researchers also noted the relative ease and cost effectiveness with which VRChat could be used for academic research into the growing field of social or collaborative virtual reality:
It is particularly exciting to note that VRChat can also be used to implement collaborative VR studies. Previously, such studies would require custom multiplayer platform development. VRChat not only provides an SDK to create worlds but also all the network capabilities to have several concurrent users all in the same virtual space.
UPDATE 2:02 p.m.: I’ve just discovered a recent five-minute YouTube video featuring the Northeastern researchers, explaining the concept of using existing social VR platforms for their experiments:
This video mentions and summarizes a second, follow-up research paper, which I have not yet read (again, you will have to pay to access this conference paper; you should be able to obtain a copy via your local public or academic library). Here’s the citation for you:
Saffo, D., Bartolomeo, S. Di, Yildirim, C., & Dunne, C. (2021). Remote and collaborative virtual reality experiments via social VR platforms. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – Proceedings. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445426
I’m quite eager to read this second research paper! According to the description of the YouTube video, a preprint of this conference paper and all supplemental materials are available at the following URL: osf.io/c2amz (so you might not need to pay for a copy via interlibrary loan/document delivery from your local library, after all).
Of course, it’s not just VRChat that could be repurposed as an academic testbed. Any number of commercially available social VR platforms can be used as cost-effective platforms to conduct VR experiments! The researchers at Northeastern University are to be commended for their proof-of-concept work, and I very much look forward to seeing other uses of social VR platforms in various areas of academic virtual reality research.
