What can we do together? Drawing on some Virtual Reality Dreams

[MariaEuler]

Image credit: Demetra Monaco

To coordinate efforts and find potential connection points as well as to organise interesting and meaningful webinars for the community the edgeryders team is checking in with many old and new community members bringing their projects, initiatives or problems to be solved.

Today I had a great call with @federico_monaco .

His previous project:

PUNTOZERO WEBLAB about innovation and healthcare professions

The World Wide Web is increasingly useful to experiment, produce and research for identities, relations and objects in the field of “Healthcare & Innovation” such as Open Source, Open Access, 3D printing and Additive manufacturing, HCWH (Health Care Without Harm), Augmented and Virtual Reality, Co-Working, Workscaping and other important and emerging issues. The bet of PUNTOZERO is to call for interest and shape a networking model motivating healthcare professionals in sharing experiences and co…

seemed very interesting and relevant now. Since he could not make it to the COVID response call this Monday, so we met up in a direct call to start some ideas.

@federico_monaco is currently working on 3 things:

1. Working with his district to develop some collective intelligence approaches for crisis management and citizen engagement. The district becomes a problem solver. Like with the fab lab Barcelona. They used open tech to make citizens aware of their abilities to improve the district.
   See the example here: https://pablocommons.github.io/pablocommons.github.io/english
   You click on certain corners on the map and you get the information provided by citizens.
   Are there other entities like that like the district that would be open to work like that. We are working a lot with immigrants.

NEED:

• He looks for other districts in Europe that would like to construct a collective intelligence project.
• He looks for developers who could join the further development of the city map project. (ping @mstn?)
• Problem: can currently not continue to map the city using 360-degree image in tech due to curfew
• Look for potential connections with Plato (ping @hugi). (https://pablocommons.github.io/pablocommons.github.io/english

2. Working for education. The schools are not used to learning or teaching via distance. We are trying to provide help with homework and events for families. He has done a project with Virtual Reality mapping of schools as well as teaching children between 5 and 10 to use VR for fun and to communicate ideas.

OFFER:

• Webinar on virtual classrooms: https://scuolavirtuale.github.io/
  Could do webinar/1week course for parents, children (5-10) and educators to learn how to use VR and to make digital teaching more engaging. (more below)

3. Working with the hospital: He has been trying to connect to doctors and nurses or even students are willing to collaborate with us to provide the best information and provide prevention.
   Helping them to develop more effective communication strategies for children
   Helping them engage communities

NEED:

• More help to connect and find willing healthcare professionals as collaborators.

OFFERS:

Would do/share into a webinar/ 1 week course to use VR and online teaching as creative space. (Using the Edgeryders platform as a forum for the course)
Everything that is related to helping with the crisis.

Notes on first ideas for Social Virtual reality Painting Course:

(See reference project on virtual classrooms: https://scuolavirtuale.github.io/
Interesting point: Let’s think about virtual classrooms in general! )

The goal of the course is:

• To make virtual reality accessible to children,
• To give children a creative outlet in times of quarantine and curfew
• To use technology to empower creativity to give them means to articulates their wishes for development to test
• To conduct online teaching in a more holistic way combining digital, analogue, asynchronous and synchronous work

The first draft outline:

Workshop for children to learn how to draw environments for VR by hand:

• 1-week course for 4-5 families:
• Start first day with pre-recorded introduction video
• Provide link to resources
• Provide MOOC/Manual on Edgeryders (authored by @______) for looking up stepps and discussing questions with expert available to answer
• Finish on last day with video call with slot for presentation for each child’s project (preferably not on zoom)
• Encouraging families to upload and talk about children’s drawing (no images of the children, just the drawings!)
• Encouraging to make the room created connected to the topic of the quarantine. LIKE: “Draw you perfect room during this Quaratain time when you can not go out”
• Engage in discussion with families on how to use tech socially and creatively.

First, run in the first week of May. if it works well we can reiterate + make resources available via the manual for teachers to do it with their students!

@federico_monaco is currently working on a first draft proposal for this and will if possible join the Monday COVID response call next week.

[federico_monaco]

Thanks @MariaEuler.
Let’s help children to make their dreams come true while being indoors.
Hi @mathias, i have tried to embed by iframe or javascript a 360 image, or a virtual tour. At the same time i have read your post: How to augment edgeryders.eu to incorporate multimedia, specifically photo and video that could then be coded by SSNA
According to the development and system, do you think is there a way to show 360 images on edgeryders.eu?

[matthias]

Yes, 360° images are possible here (example).

It works with kuula.co 360° out of the box, using either their Embedly or HTML Embed sharing options. The HTML embed (iframe based) sharing option is preferable as it shows up larger.

If you want to use a different service for sharing 360° images, and similarly for any service for sharing virtual tours: it should work with Embedly / OneBox embed compatible links by just posting them on their own line here in a Discourse post. Again for the kuula.co example, you would write:

https://kuula.co/post/7lMbd

Again, results will be better when using iframe code snippets to do the embedding. To make that possible, tell me which service you want to use as I’ll have to whitelist its domain in the admin settings first to make embedding possible.

[federico_monaco]

Great! Thanks @matthias problem solved! We can use kuula only and leave whitelist as it is.

@MariaEuler we can use edgeryders to publish embedded children’s drawings in VR from Kuula.

[matthias]

Hey, that’s a novel use of VR, great initiative As said, embedding with the kuula.co iframe code is preferable, as it results in a larger embed. In you case, the code given under “Share → Export → Embed HTML” by kuula.co is:

<iframe 
  width="100%" height="640" 
  style="width: 100%; height: 640px; border: none; max-width: 100%;" 
  frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="true" 
  allow="vr,gyroscope,accelerometer,fullscreen" scrolling="no" 
  src="https://kuula.co/share/7FwQ2?fs=1&vr=0&sd=1&thumbs=1&chromeless=0&logo=0">
</iframe>

And just pasting that here into the Discourse editor will result in this:

[MariaEuler]

Have been spreading this idea around a bit and everyone is very enthusiastic!

@federico_monaco, I have a few questions for you:

• How can we best support you?
• Can you post a link for a programme to use to do some experiments? Or could people post pictures in this thread to have them converted at some point?
• would you maybe also be up to do a short introduction for “grown-up” artists (not much prep needed)
• would you potentially be interested in collaboration with one or multiple creative education experts in developing the course?
• I gathered that you do not like to use Zoom, is it a prerequisite for the webinar that we find a different platform? @owen, do you think edgeryders.now could handle it? Probably 5 to 10 call members in early May.

And I also would like to use this opportunity to bring this to the attention of the ethno team. @amelia what do you think about how to “code images” and the surrounding discussions? Do you maybe have some interesting questions we could use to kick of the creation? Like “how do you think your room will look like in 10 years? Maybe that would lead to the children drawing rooms that can be connected to an NGI conversation? Or “how would your perfect room look like now that you are not allowed to go out?” Or “what should a room look like in times of Corona”, or more open like " draw your dreams”.

[matthias]

how to “code images” and the surrounding discussions?

Not too sure about the value for our purposes of coding these images, but it can be done:

Open Ethnographer contains a feature to code images by marking rectangular sections and adding an annotation to them. But the above 360° images are technically not images but JavaScript elements. You can however create a panorama version of these, or in this case even better an “unfolded cube” version and code these. As this plain version is not relevant for normal users, I propose it would be added by moderator users into [details="Summary"] … [/details] tags, to be hidden for normal users (except when they really want to see this).

[federico_monaco]

Hi @MariaEuler,
i’m figuring out the workflow as well, as it is something completely new and challenging.
Here are some answers to your questions…

*How can we best support you?*

i think you are already doing it; edgeryders platform is the perfect place for this. As primer for both i would say to make it as simple as possible. Is a thread the best place, or a wiki? We must consider perhaps people already confident and familiar with edgeryders platform, otherwise they should be trained about edgeryders as well; i hope people from the community with children is going to be inspired by such proposal.

*Can you post a link for a programme to use to do some experiments? Or could people post pictures in this thread to have them converted at some point?*

According to @matthias suggestions we proceed by uploading 2:1 images of drawings on https://kuula.co/ and then sharing those on edgeryders.

*would you maybe also be up to do a short introduction for “grown-up” artists (not much prep needed)*

of course

*would you potentially be interested in collaboration with one or multiple creative education experts in developing the course?*

sure!

*I gathered that you do not like to use Zoom, is it a prerequisite for the webinar that we find a different platform? @owen, do you think edgeryders.now could handle it? Probably 5 to 10 call members in early May.*

I can use Zoom, no problem. Anything goes.

About a possible virtual ethnography of virtual reality sounds great, as far as we understand how to deal with coding about no textual representations (@matthias thanks again! the idea of selecting rectangula sections) and thick description of imaginaries by children. Maybe we could ask other children to comment images and be reflective on such experience. @amelia any suggestions? (Hi there!). In the future, it would be also interesting to get a VR image of the social network about VR images… going fractal…sorry.

As soon as possible I’ll provide a visual workflow and we can decide on a date for the event.

[MariaEuler]

Regarding an funding application to the Culture of Solidarity Fund here their answer for the timeframe for projects:
European Cultural Foundation

We have no strict limitations regarding project timelines. As for starting date, activities within the frames of the project proposals may start prior to the submission deadline (27 April), but we can only consider projects that are still ongoing at the time of the selection of awarded proposals (31 May). Projects may also continue into 2021, in fact, the complete timeline of the project may be up to 24 months.