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On December 10th the Public VR Lab & BostonVR’s held a joint Civic XR Meetup event to learn more about Civic XR, and how technologists are using VR/XR in the public interest.
During the meetup we heard great talks by:
· Craig Herndon CEO Boston VR
· Jennifer Gradecki and Derek Curry from Northeastern University
· Jeff Jacobson from BostonVR and Boston Children’s Hospital
· Laura Schatzkin and Dave Maass, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
· Kathy Bisbee, founder of the Public VR Lab
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Learn VR & AR at BIG/The Public VR Lab
Sign up here for ONLY the jam: https://www.eventbrite.
Civic XR: Using XR in the Public Interest
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Our founder and executive director, Kathy Bisbee presented a riveting talk on why the time is right now for community media and local government organizations to invest in a grassroots movement for community-based virtual reality, in the creative economy of VR, and in VR/XR storytelling.
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Arrival: Immigration in Full Frame
BIG and our project, the Public VR Lab, are proud to announce the launch of a participatory media installation on immigration and migration stories in Brookline and beyond. We’ll be sharing the first release of Boston and Brookline stories from Arrival: Immigration in Full Frame in our container at Hubweek from Wednesday, October 10th through Sunday, October 14th, 2018!
In addition to watching these compelling XR/VR stories, visitors will also have the opportunity to record their own families’ immigration and migration stories onsite as part of an interactive component of BIG’s exhibit. These new stories will be included in a broader national project that features a VR/XR visual timeline, scheduled to launch as a separate immersive storytelling project in late 2019-early 2020 at film festivals, libraries, museums, and arts and cultural organizations nationwide.
Please come by Hubweek October 10th-14th in Boston’s Government Center, check out the stories and share your own American arrival story!
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Come be curious and play with us for two days of professional development in VR, AR and 360 storytelling in Boston this summer!
Sign up here, and email Erin [at] brooklineinteractive.org with any questions.
Learn new skills, experiment, and gain curriculum and units for your classroom!
We’ll have two tracks on the Basics of Unity and another on creating 360 digital storytelling projects using personal narratives with your students in the middle school, high school and college level classroom.
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As June ends, we’re celebrating all things Community Media and Community XR! Join us today at 3 pm EDT I’ll be presenting on Community XR today on a national webinar for the Alliance for Community Media (ACM). Register here for:
This week we’ll be at XR for Change in NYC, launched this years’ Crowdsourced Boston community arts project to have 40 teams remake a scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
We taught a media training to our job training youth program who then successfully pitched a reporter on their story before taking them on a career eye-opening trip to meet and learn about VR, marketing, and diversity initiatives from Colin Burch, VP of Marketing & Broadcasting at the Red Sox!
This month we were also featured on Hubweek’s blog, an amazing festival here in Boston focused on the synergy of art, technology, advocacy, community-building and health that we’re honored to be a partner with and a collaborator. This interview focuses on our new artist-in-residency pilot and our collaboration with talented artist, Nathan Miner.
https://medium.com/@HUBweek/featured-collaboration-brookline-interactive-groups-kathy-bisbee-and-artist-nathan-miner-bff42482b6a6
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BIG, the Public VR Lab, Fasility, and the Mozilla Foundation invite you to join the WebVR Experience Challenge and create a new game, experience, design, or interaction using assets from the Real Time Design Challenge with Sketchfab.
Mini-WebVR Hack: 1-6pm on Saturday, March 17th, 46 Tappan Street, Brookline MA at BIG
Register here:
Bring your WebVR skills to the next level at this one-day mini-hackathon at Brookline Interactive Group (BIG) hosted by the Public VR Lab and Fasility, in partnership with Mozilla Foundation.
Mozilla invites you to join the WebVR Experience Challenge and create a new game, experience, design, or interaction using assets from the Real Time Design Challenge with Sketchfab.This mini-hack will offer workshops and mentoring to help you meet the challenge! Participating is an awesome way to gain experience in WebVR and become a part of the open-source VR community.
Submissions are due to Mozilla by April 2, 2018. By the end of the day’s mini-hack, you’ll have improved your plan, prototype, or in-progress project to help you along the path to a successful submission.
Refreshments will be provided during the afternoon and the event will conclude with time to share the day’s results and vote for superlatives.
This hack is in partnership with the Mozilla Foundation, hosted at BIG & the Public VR Lab, in collaboration with our awesome WEBVR partner, Fasility.
You can join our Public VR Lab Meetup group to learn more about hacks and events at the Public VR Lab!
Mohammad Azam
The second hack is with Boston VR on augmented reality (AR) and using AR Tookit.Mohammad Azam (http://www.azamsharp.com/) is a well-known ARKit guru and instructor. He will give a free class on ARKit at 10:15AM, open to the public. The class will start with learning the basics of ARKit development and then dive into intermediate topics. Azam will also provide free access to his best seller 8+ hour Udemy course on ARKit and his ARKit development book.
The rest of the day, until 6:00pm, will be a chance for everyone to work on their own VR and AR projects. We’ll have one or two htc vives, an Oculus rift, a hololens or two, and so on. However, the resources and emphasis will be on ARKit. We will gather as many ARKit experts and other resources as we can and add them here, as they are found.
An iPhone 6S or above is required to run ARKit applications.
We will begin at 10:15 am sharp.
There will be a small $5.00 fee to pay for pizza and snacks. If you cannot afford it for any reason, please contact jeff@enterprisevr.com and we’ll give you complimentary ticket.
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[article originally posted on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/immersive-storytellers-craft-unique-experiences-media-kathy-bisbee]
In 2016, Jeff Delviscio, Director, Multimedia and Creative at the Boston Globe’s STAT news team, bumped into the executive director, Kathy Bisbee, of Brookline Interactive Group (BIG), where she was demoing VR to throngs of science journalists and media makers. He wanted to explore how his cutting-edge news team, STAT, focused on finding and telling compelling stories about health, medicine and scientific discovery, could tell compelling stories about medicine and science using 360 video or VR. Kathy had hoped to share BIG’s experience training and creating VR content with other media organizations.
Kathy had co-founded the Public VR Lab as part of her work at Brookline Interactive Group (BIG) an innovative community media center, and was creating AR, VR and 360 content with her team. The Lab had started planting the seeds for what would become “Community VR,” a local and national project and movement that would train journalists, filmmakers, creators, and storycoders to create VR in the public interest, based out of Brookline, MA and trained and collaborated with libraries, arts organizations and journalists. The Lab now has an affiliate program, and offers VR toolkits, equipment and a training program to VR creators, journalists, filmmakers, educators, and municipalities.
Together STAT, BIG and the Public VR Lab collaborated to produce three unique experiences in locations around Boston that resulted in three 360 films introducing Boston residents and viewers worldwide to what it might feel like to work in a high security lab on the Ebola virus in Boston’s NEIDL (National Emerging Infectious Diseases lab); or to better understand the experience of a Tufts Dental School student, and sense intense teamwork of the effective Boston Children’s Hospital’s infant trauma unit. All films were created in 360 video that can be watched online, in a VR headset, or even on your phone, and screened at Boston’s Hubweek in October 2017.
Read more and check out these unique experiences from the team at STAT, Brookline Interactive Group, and the Public VR Lab, written and documented below and online by Hyacinth Empinado, STAT News staffer.
[Team photo at Hubweek: STAT Director, Jeff Delviscio; BIG Lead Creative Designer, Nir Darom; STAT News staffer/editor, Hyacinth Empinado; BIG VR Coordinator, Josh Widdicombe]
What does it look like inside a level-4 biosafety lab? And what does it feel like to be inside an operating room, performing a delicate procedure on a critically ill child?
In the world of science and medicine, places like this are often reserved exclusively for highly trained specialists.
But immersive 360-degree videos can gives us all a better sense for what it’s like to see the world through these specialists’ eyes. In the videos below, originally produced for HUBweek in partnership with Brookline Interactive Group and the Public VR Lab, you can explore these spaces on your own screen. To look around, click on the videos with your mouse and move it in any direction.
Research on dangerous pathogens like Ebola takes place inside highly secure biosafety level-4 (BSL-4) labs. Elke Mühlberger, a researcher at the National Emerging Diseases Laboratory at Boston University, takes you as close to Ebola as you’ll ever get and talks about why she thinks of the deadly virus as her pet.
On any given day, rows of fake heads are on the receiving end of whirring drills at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine. Mikenah Vega, a fourth-year student, shows us how she preps her head (which she calls “my boyfriend Miguel”) for a day at the simulation clinic, where students learn all about our teeth.
On any given day, rows of fake heads are on the receiving end of whirring drills at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine, where students learn about teeth.
Watch a team of physicians, nurses, and surgeons simulate a high-risk procedure, called ECMO, on a critically ill child during a training session at Boston Children’s Hospital. ECMO is a machine that temporarily takes over a child’s weakened heart and lungs, giving him or her time to heal. To increase the child’s chances of survival, the team has to make every moment count.
About the Public VR Lab
The Public VR Lab facilitates public dialogue; provides professional training; empowers community knowledge and creation of 360, virtual and augmented content; provides access to tools, headsets, arcades, toolkits, and professional expertise; and generates locally-focused, broadly impactful, Next Realities experiences in the public interest.
The Lab has trained immersive journalists, filmmakers, educators and storycoders to use VR/AR/360; offers VR Toolkits of hardware, software and curriculum to nonprofits, arts organizations and libraries; and has collaborated to create VR content, events and training programs with the Boston Globe, the United Nations, Women in Next Realities, Boston VR, the Town of Brookline, and the Northampton Film Festival.
About STAT
STAT is a national publication focused on finding and telling compelling stories about health, medicine and scientific discovery. We produce daily news, investigative articles, and narrative projects in addition to multimedia features. We tell our stories from the places that matter to our reader– research labs, hospitals, executive suites, and political campaigns.
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Tomorrow we’re driving down to Games for Change in NYC. As usual, I’m thinking about VR-in-the-public interest and how we can differentiate gaming from the many other ways we can learn, share, create and teach VR. At the Public VR Lab, we’ve been teaching our community and beyond for over a year now to use new tools and equipment for community storytelling, immersive journalism, and documentary filmmaking in order to heal from trauma and to create awareness and action around the health of our planet. Here’s a few of this week’s highlights and resources we’ve seen so far in the space.
On the content creation side, our team is learning how we can deploy content, trainings and toolkits to our members, community of media makers and to share with other colleagues. While this may seem something drawn from the 1992 novel “Snow Crash” and its “metaverse,” it means the beginning of public creation tools and a door to many new social, creative and possibly economic platforms/spaces that are sure to follow for an almost ready VR-ready world. This might be the closest thing to Dreamweaver for VR that we’ve seen to date. P.S Snow Crash is a must-read.
Empathy-producing content can help us to understand what it is like to “be” a tree, or understand what it might be like to be in the body of another, and to feel “presence” that helps you to put yourself outside of your own experience. Feeling empathy inside of VR can even move us to action on issues like social and environmental justice in the “real” world.
VR-related technologies can help shape beautiful new ways we see ourselves, our current reality, and can shift our perception of what truth and reality are. VR can help us experience and understand many things from visceral perspectives that embody the experience of the “other.”
Tree, is a virtual-reality project that transforms you into a rainforest tree. With your arms as branches and your body as the trunk, you’ll experience the tree’s growth from a seedling into its fullest form and witness its fate firsthand. Tree elevates the concept of empathy in VR, helping the participant understand what it’s like to be a tree in the Amazon. I particularly love the redwood version of this created by Marshmallow Laser Feast (I so love this name!) with a haptic feedback vest that makes you feel like you are entering inside the tree. 
And this project, RIOT whose filmmaker, Karen Palmer, will speak at our favorite festival for storytelling, the Future of Storytelling in NYC this October. According to FOST, she was inspired by the events in Ferguson, MO, following the shooting of Michael Brown, and created RIOT, an emotionally responsive, live-action film that uses AI and machine learning through facial recognition to allow participants to navigate though a dangerous riot. Palmer’s work challenges participants to understand other people’s lived experiences, and represents a powerful development in the emerging field of neurogames.
Another area of VR-in-the-public interest growth is in the health sector, and how VR can make us “think” differently and even heal from trauma. This New York Times had a great story today about the use of VR by therapists to heal patients from the fear and trauma of car accidents, the fear of heights, flying, spiders, PTSD, and other forms of anxiety and stress.
And lastly, the team at the Public VR Lab sat in on an insightful VRARA webinar a few weeks ago hosted with Robert Scoble as he shared his always intriguing insights about where tech and VR in particular is headed (here). Check it out!
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We’ve been super busy this month at the Public VR Lab and Brookline Interactive Group.
We’re hiring a new Assistant Director, have several summer multimedia programs (aka “camps”) for kids, launched new VR classes for adults, and co-coordinated Crowdsourced Boston to get ten other community media centers involved in re-creating Back to the Future! BIG’s talented members won three awards at the Alliance for Community Media‘s national Hometown Awards, and BIG won Best Public Access Station in the country! Woot!
We are laying our plans for our fall eleven-day film sprint, curating the immersive content and LIVE VR ART at the Northampton Film Festival for their September 27-October 1st, 2017 fest, in collaboration with our sister organization, Northampton Community Television (NCTV).
We’re launching a national collaborative on a VR project around immigration stories, and an affiliate program will be announced soon so that libraries, teen centers, arts and cultural organizations and media centers can learn to share VR with their communities, have the equipment and training they need to start a Lab on site and engage their communities in a conversation about the future of 3D computing!
Our VR demos are weekly, and recently we had Lead Boston, Brookline High School math camps, and the Gateway Arts program stop by for a tour and VR demos at the Lab.
Check out the cool vid of their folks playing for the first time in VR above!