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How virtual reality is changing post-secondary education


In a classroom filled with first-year students inside Ryerson University’s Architectural Science building, Semeen Mahbub is spinning around in a swivel chair, peering through a compact pair of virtual reality glasses attached to her smartphone. As professor Vincent Hui looks on, the 17-year-old student checks out her design for an information kiosk at Ryerson.

“One of the requirements is that the kiosk be deployable in some way, so you can open and close it,” she says about the class assignment. “Mine has space for people to be inside it, but as you can see, it’s actually quite dark inside, so maybe I need to add a light or skylight or something.”

Mahbub looks up from her VR glasses and places her phone in my hands. Inside the VR world, I can experience a realistic rendering of Mahbub’s design, the same one she has pulled up on her laptop.

“VR lets me see mistakes because I’m actually inside the building,” she says. “You can’t see those details normally, but you can experience them fully in VR.”

This is the first time a Ryerson program has integrated virtual reality into its classrooms, but not the first use of VR in schools. Upper-level students in Ryerson’s computer science program learn to create games and apps in VR, and the digital art production program has courses in immersive imaging and digital animation – both necessary to create VR environments.

Until she recently retired, professor Denise Reid ran a neuro-rehabilitation and virtual reality laboratory for autism, stroke and brain injury patients in the University of Toronto’s department of occupational science and occupational therapy.

And one of the best-known uses of VR in schools was at University of British Columbia, where law professor Jon Festinger delivered a lecture in virtual reality in 2014. Seven students in Festinger’s video game law class wore Oculus Rift headsets to experienced the lecture from another part of the law school.

“What became clear is that immersive 3D devices have the potential to really work in an educational context,” Festinger wrote in a blog post. “The day may come when schools are libraries, offices and common meeting places, with most classrooms being virtual because learning actually happens better that way.

“We are far from that place right now, but before this experiment such a future seemed like pure science fiction. It does not any more.”

The increased presence of VR in classrooms has a lot to do with the growing accessibility of headsets and software. Just a few years ago, VR was solely the domain of high-tech conferences and research labs, but since its boom in the gaming and entertainment industries, the price of devices has dramatically decreased. Oculus Rift headsets like the ones used at UBC are still around $600, but some headsets and Google Cardboard viewers run as low as $20. The Homido Minis used by Ryerson’s architecture students cost $25.

Those enrolled in the Bachelor of Architectural Science degree, a highly competitive four-year undergraduate program that admits only 140 first-year students, use their Homido VR glasses for visualizing buildings and structures. Professor Hui, who’s quarterbacking the pilot, believes this technology will train them to be better architects.

“When you’re seeing things in VR, you’re more sensitive to how the building’s put together and what views you’re trying to set up, things you don’t always pick up just from looking at floor plans,” Hui explains. “The accessibility helps students develop their ideas.”

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Yulio

Yulio enables architects to experience their building designs in virtual reality.


The VR software used at Ryerson, called Yulio, was launched by a Toronto-based technology company of the same name in March. Yulio can be used as a plug-in for most major computer-aided architectural design (CAAD) tools and works through a smartphone app.

Outside the classroom, architecture, interior design and real estate firms use the software to plot office space or show different room configurations to prospective condo buyers. The interest shown by Ryerson has prompted the company to target universities. Yishi Pani, a Yulio spokesperson, calls this a seeding strategy.

“Students who are VR abled have a competitive advantage,” she says. “We see big architectural firms looking for people with a VR background to join their companies.”

For Hui, this was one of the selling points for bringing Yulio to Ryerson. Many architecture students opt for a co-op term to gain real-world experience before graduation.

Before Stephan Joo arrived at Ryerson in September, the Toronto teen had no experience with virtual reality. He’d watched YouTube videos of people demonstrating how VR works and what it looks like on screen, but never thought it would be part of his school curriculum.

“I never expected that a few months into my first year at university, I’d be seeing my buildings as if I were standing inside them. They looked so much better than how they looked on paper,” says Joo.

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Michelle da Silva

Students designed the locker room in Ryerson’s Digital Media Experience Lab with the help of VR.


While first-year students are focused on grasping basic design skills and gaining familiarity with different software and technologies, upper-level students have already completed the design and construction of the digital media experience lab locker room on the third floor of Ryerson’s Student Learning Centre, aided by virtual reality.

“It was nice to know we could see it before we could actually make it,” says Erik Aquino, a third-year student. “Yulio perfectly depicted how we saw it in VR compared to real life.”

The benefit of VR is that architects can troubleshoot problems before construction begins. Students previously had to rely on intricate line drawings or clumsy models made from cardboard and glue. While they still learn those foundational skills, with virtual reality they’re able to spend their time more efficiently.

Hui says that having a photo-realistic visual aide enables him to communicate feedback and instruction to students more clearly as well.

“Students can project themselves into certain spaces and think about the variables of architecture. All those things that aren’t internal, that aren’t really conveyed properly through 3D modelling, can actually be expressed correctly,” he says. “VR lets us focus on the details, on the structure and on the things that make architecture more than a pretty picture.”

michelled@nowtoronto.com | @michdas

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