Is the future 3D?
- Article 11 of 15
- EducationInvestor, June 2013
Will 3D be the next must-have technology for schools? Students will be able to immerse themselves in environments and study objects they could never examine, using little more than glasses and a projector or TV. With 3D technology cheaper than ever, not just to buy but for creating content, and with students now used to 3D thanks to cinema and home theatre technology, will VR finally see some uptake? And if it does, who are going to be the winners?
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Wilson doesn't see the necessity of 3D in every classroom or every lesson, with design and technical subjects being the most suited. "In something like biology, where you can see a leaf's or skin's structure, it's obviously applicable to 3D. However, for French or maths, it would be more of a gimmick." He sees perhaps only one or two classrooms in any given school being adapted for 3D, to be used as an additional resource or perhaps even a treat for students.
Apart from waiting for the technology to become affordable, Epson had been looking for an even more important aspect of the market to mature: the availability of 3D content, particularly for secondary schools. It's one thing to be technically able to project and immerse oneself in 3D, but unless there's something in which to become immersed, there's little point investing in the technology.
"The stuff we use is highly technical and you need skills to use it," says Spencer Ayres of Birmingham Ormiston Academy, which uses 3D projection to display what its students have been creating in digital design classes. "There are pieces of software, stock models and Google Sketch to realise 3D content, but like many things, it's still all about coding and you need those fundamentals of art, understanding of form and so on to create good content."
So bolstering the ability of both professional companies and teachers to create 3D content that can be used in classes is one of the tasks Dassault Systèmes has set for itself. "We're looking at how we can facilitate production and how people can re-purpose the large amount of pre-existing 3D content. We're also looking at how we can make the editing and authoring tools easier to use. Our 3DVIA Composer tool is designed to work like editing a video, where instead of combining video, you combine 3D data, either that you've created or that you've found on the internet." Work is also being done on crowd-sourcing content for teachers and there's even a social network for 3D content.
However, one of the reasons for Epson's new market confidence is because of companies such as 3D-Hub, which not only can create original 3D content but also repurpose existing 2D content as 3D content - for a price. "To a large extent, teachers face a lack of time to be able to create their own material. 3D-Hub are perfectly happy to transform your content into 3D - it's quicker and easier," says Wilson.
And there's one last piece of movie-making technology that offers new possibilities for creating 3D content for the education market: motion capture. Mark Miles of CGI and animation company Rendermedia argues that this offers a way to involve particularly younger students at a low cost. "3D is at the point now where you can do so much more than you can with conventional video, such as motion capture, where you capture children's movements and then overlay them on a 3D character. They can see themselves as vikings, pick up broken bits of Roman pottery and see what it would have looked like whole, and so on. It's immersive and it's instant, unlike video, and the feedback from schools is amazing - students are engaging and expressing themselves in ways they never could do before." Miles says the cost of motion capture equipment is roughly £7,000 - expensive now but cheap for something that would have cost £0.5 million 10 years ago. Unlike older motion captures techniques, the latest generation needs no special costumes and requires just one minute to calibrate the equipment for any given child.
For many teachers, 3D visualisation isn't on their radar; even those who have considered it aren't sure how they can use it. However, with financial pressures forcing education institutions to re-examine how they can engage with students and cut costs in vocational subjects - and with more and more 3D content becoming available - 3D is likely to become more and more attractive. The chances are that 3D, even if it's not 'the next big thing', will soon go, in the words of Epson's Paul Wilson, "from being a 'gimmick' to 'a thing'".
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