Explore & Discover XR (AR & VR) for Research and Education

Photo: Orkun Tekeli, Ioana Mereuta, Barbara Krawczyk and Timon Verduijn

In the presentation ‘Explore & Discover Extended Reality, XR, (AR & VR) for Research and Education’ WANDER Lab will unfold the potential of visualisations and immersive experiences for WUR’s domain.

Ioana Mereuta, Sr. Project Manager at WANDER: “We want to invite people of the WUR community to join this meeting to discover that it is not so difficult to use immersive experiences and technologies in research and education. And importantly, that it is not as expensive as they think it is.”

Ioana Mereuta: “With this meeting we will explain, in normal understandable words, how feasible it is to develop something to create immersive experiences and visualizations tailored to your research and education. With some examples of our current projects, the participants can get an idea about how they can benefit of the added value of these immersive visualizations and immersive technologies.”

Research and education

WANDER is promoting and facilitating an important trend in research, education, and outreach enabled through immersive technologies like Augmented reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Mixed Reality (MR). But there’s still not a common understanding how to start, how to use it, and what its advantages and potentials are for research and education. With a strong core team of developers and associated researchers, WANDER aims at becoming the bridge for merging these techniques with both research and education.

Mereuta: “These XR technologies are not simple gadgets or only usable for games, but they can play such an important role in research and education. They can simulate in a very realistic way, for instance, how landscapes will look like 100 years from now based on models and data. We also had requests to use these technologies as a new medium to collect data about the consumer behaviour in a particular scenario such as food choices.

From the education side, some professors are already considering XR as a new way to teach. An interesting question from a social science perspective is how would virtual environments provide students the opportunity to better understand the global refugee crisis from the refugee’s eye point of view? These are only a few examples. Overall, there are great possibilities for research and education with XR considering integrating technologies such as gaze tracking data combined for instance with speech-recognition data. We can use XR as a new way to approach WUR research questions, interact and communicate its insights while evaluating its impact.”

Show cases

Asked to give some practical examples of their projects, WANDER picked out three examples out of their diverse portfolio also shown on this website.

“With the project Virtual Tomato - Crop Viewer we have been working with Netherlands Plant Eco-phenotyping Center (NPEC) in the greenhouse on campus. We made an interface with the data of the growth of the tomatoes, so that the growth can be visualized, to collect extra input during their research and to communicate with the stakeholders. This was an interesting project with Dr. Jochem Evers’ team at Plant Science Group.

Together with Dr. Will Hurst, Assistant Professor in Data Science at the Social Sciences Group, we developed an application for students called heARtbeat to learn about the anatomical body. In this case we advised the path of augmented reality on the mobile phone so it’s available to everyone. The phone is a very nice interface in education projects.

Another interesting project is Schokland: World Heritage Site in Mixed Reality. The project uses the Hololenses glasses from Microsoft which gives a reproduction of virtual content on top of the reality. In this way, being at the island and wearing these glasses you can ‘see’ how the reality looked like some 700 years ago. We visualized the data from every 100 years, so you can experience the evolution. A wonderful project made with the enormous amount of data collected by Dr. Roy van Beek, Assistant Professor at the departments of Soil Geography and Landscape (SGL) and Cultural Geography (GEO). NWO is excited about this application and is producing a video of this project.

Interesting and challenging

Through this type of events WANDER is telling people that they are not alone in discovering this journey, and that they can count on a core team of excellent developers to onboard the journey. WANDER’s core team are highly skilled developers and designers. They are working closely with scientists from all of Wageningen, both domain experts and XR researchers, to advance research and education through immersive experiences and to add value to research projects and topics. Together we dive into the subject, brainstorm, discover how does it work, and jointly we decide how to start, what steps we can take, what we can develop and how to further improve in an interactive way. With a very clear workflow, everything is possible. This is not only very interesting and challenging process for our stakeholders but also for us. We learn a lot about all different subjects from climate change to plant growth and protein transition.”

Unique added value

Orkun will talk about the advantages for the WUR community and external stakeholders to cooperate with WANDER. One of them is collecting data in a very different way. For instance, with the analysis of consumer behaviour, researchers can collect data based on choices virtually and test the effectiveness of interventions advancing, for example, the protein transition. Or, simulations can be made in real time allowing, for example, farmers to explore and experience what-if scenarios. Dashboards can evolve towards a more realistic environment. In this way also non-experts can understand what it is happening; the interpretation is done through the visualization. These techniques can be helpful in every stage of the research or education journey and not for so much money as you think, according to Ioana. WANDER started with the financial support from the Environmental Sciences Group and the WUR Executive Board, Ioana explains.

“Because as an internal partner, we are a knowledge centre that mainly focuses on adding value for the WUR community. If they shine, they get more research projects within WUR, then our job is done.”

Collaboration

WANDER is already working very closely with researchers from ESG, SSG, PSG and AgroFood Robotics. And WANDER has also strong partnerships with the Wageningen Data Competence Center (WDCC) and the library. Ioana: “At the moment we focus on internal partners and 4TU, we work with the universities of Eindhoven and Delft. Apart from these contacts we have conversations on collaboration with Friesland-Campina and OnePlanet.

At the moment we are building our lab at GAIA building (second floor) which will be a space for the WUR community and later on for external stakeholders. In the very near future anyone is welcome in in our WANDER lab.

In the future we hope and expect to be a Research Facility for a wider audience. It should link the needs of our society with Wageningen. At this moment we are planning how to expand these knowledge and techniques and how to make it reachable for everyone, Easy Access. It is all about having the right amount of curiosity, the right amount of data and eagerness. The techniques are already there. And you don’t have to be Steve Jobs to use it.”