About the Project

The ScholarsVR project is a two-part project as follows:

Version 1: The project was a collaboration between UBC EML, the Centre for Digital Media (CDM), and Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT) to create an application where users can experience scholarly writing in an immersive environment.

Version 2: The second version will allow users to be guided through live interactions with an artificially intelligent actor to experience the scholarly within an open desert wasteland, complete tasks and be teleported through portals into different micro-experiences, or “MicroX”.

Once such MicroX is a classroom environment where users will be tested on their attention span given a boring lecture with several distractions around them. Users will be able to interact with various objects and learn through anecdotes, research references, and historical facts.

Will you be able to solve the riddle of the Grail? Can your attention span survive? How long will you last through this excruciatingly boring experience?

Objective

The project has three main objectives:

1. Serve as a medium of knowledge transfer to users
2. Criticism the modern state of academia through satire, and challenge the norm of scholarly writing
3. Demonstrate the potential of VR as a learning tool

The Team

Faculty

• Dr. Patrick Pennefather | Assistant Professor, UBC Theatre and Film

Students

• Dante Cerron, Project Lead

Past Student Team Members

• Atif Mahmud | Technical Lead and Project Coordinator
• Tasha Coote | Design, Accessibilty, and PM
• Brant Yin | Software Development
• Manu Koipallil | Software Development
• Michelle Huynh | Software Development
• Paolina Buck | Design Lead
• Zarrin Tasnim Binte Moin | Design, 3D Modelling
• Vera Bao | Design, UX