Is the future 3D?

• Article 11 of 15
• EducationInvestor, June 2013

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Even the casual cinema-goer will have noticed that the past decade has brought a new dimension to the silver screen - the third dimension. With just a pair of special glasses, cinema-goers can see the events on-screen happen as though they're right in front of them, and with 3D TV sets and Blu-Ray players, they can enjoy the same experience at home.

Much of current education technology is based on two-dimensional representations of information, whether it's on a whiteboard, projected, on a computer monitor or in a textbook. Yet with these 3D technologies now at affordable prices, the possibility for education to benefit from the third dimension is very much here.

Certainly, there are already some early adopters in this country using 3D technologies to improve their teaching. Martin Biron, head of school for construction at the College of North West, has been working with 3D technologies for more than six years. Largely, this has been through simulated 3D - objects modelled in three-dimensions but displayed on 2D screens - but students, most of whom are online learners, have recently been able to expand their learning experience to full 3D through glasses if they've so desired.

The school uses the virtual online environment Second Life, where it has two 'campuses', to enable students to interact with one another through simulated versions of themselves, attend lessons and handle detailed simulations of real-world objects. "This blended methodology is very useful and beneficial," says Biron. Rather than having to come into the college to study particular pieces of machinery and techniques, students can stay at home and work at their own pace over the internet. Because everything is virtual, objects that could not be created or afforded in the real world can be explored. "We even have central heaters built on a giant scale with water flowing through them."

As well as Second Life, the college has worked with Cengage Learning's Skills2Learn VR software to develop models that allow students to practise their soldering techniques on virtual pipes before they eventually work on the real thing. "It's saved us thousands. The cost of copper is going through the roof, but if students study and apply the technique virtually, we find when they do the task in reality, they understand the method better and there's a lot less wasted."

Biron says that by deploying 3D in this way, the college has avoided losing business from learners who demand more than simply "being lectured to" and who appreciate the versatility in learning it offers. The investment the college has made in 3D - a few thousand pounds in its Second Life activities and a few tens of thousands for the dedicated 3D developer needed to produce some of the models as well as the Skills2Learn app - has also delivered a "sizeable return" that's much greater than that investment.

Biron envisages 3D become an even greater part of the learning experience, particularly when Google's Glass - an Internet-connected pair of glasses that can overlay information on the real world - becomes available commercially.

Xavier Fouger, head of global academic programs at French company Dassault Systèmes, argues that removing this need to physically visit somewhere, as well as the return on investment, is what will drive the adoption of 3D. "A big change that is purely economic in education is that the cost of education must be reduced. Many institutions are taking the initiative to reduce costs." For example, he says, in France, several high schools are offering an application that provides the 3D experience of how to operate a cutting machine, using 3D glasses similar to those used in cinemas. "You spend less time in the lab learning how to operate the machine." Harvard and other universities are also using both projected and 'immersive' 3D, in which people can walk around in a room where the walls and ceilings feature projected 3D content, to visit not only remote locations but locations, such as the Giza Plateau, mocked up as they would have appeared in previous centuries, complete with buildings that no longer exist. On top of all this, the company is also looking to augment digital textbooks with 3D content, so that they become much more interactive experiences.

Dassault is also looking to augment this kind of visible 3D with a more immersive experience, where so-called 'haptic' feedback allows users not only to see 3D computer-generated content but to 'feel' it. "This was very expensive but is now affordable. We're starting on a project designed to equip all French high schools with this kind of virtual learning reality for a cost of €5,000 per school."

Paul Wilson of Epson agrees that the cost of 3D has now come down to the point where it's affordable for schools. Six months ago, his company announced a 3D projection system aimed at secondary schools with a recommended retail price of £1,300; add in 3D glasses costing £30 for a pack of five (or picked up from the local cinema or a third-party) and a £400-700 silver screen to be projected onto, depending on how big you want it to be, and the system still costs less than £2,500.

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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