W E E K E N D E D I T I O N | M A R C H 15 -18 , 2 0 18 | T W I C E W E E K LY I N P R I N T | O U D A I LY. C O M
OU’s Virtual Reality Association vice president Alex Hopper dives into VR gameplay in the VisLab on Feb 28. The VisLab is part of the Tom Love Innovation Hub.
AUSTIN CARRIERE/THE DAILY
EXPLORE THE FUTURE OU Virtual Reality Association provides students with opportunity to increase technological skills, job prospects
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HEATH KUYKENDALL • @HEATHKUYKENDAL1
U ’s To m L o v e Innovation Hub contains a lot of interesting technology, and the visual lab, filled with headsets and monitors, is no exception. Tucked away near the coding lab, the Tom Love Innovation Hub’s virtual reality room contains several monitors and chairs all linked into headsets and handheld items used during a virtual reality experience. Looking around the room, most screens contain 3-D landscapes with drifting clouds and vibrant colors. It’s hard to resist the call to put on a headset and dive into a virtual world. For the students of OU’s Virtual Reality Association, these virtual panoramas represent far more than just enjoyable games and experiences. These panoramas represent a future in a world that is growing more and more reliant on VR technology. In December 2016, computer science juniors Bryson Reece, Ryan Dobyns and Joseph Allen teamed up with fifth-year art, technology and culture majors Jacob Young and Alex Hopper to create an organization that would focus on enhancing students knowledge of VR while giving them an outlet through which they could work on VR projects.
Reece, the group’s current president, said that while “Innovation @ the Edge,” the Bizzell Memorial Library’s sponsored workshop for innovative projects, has VR technology, the group felt there still wasn’t a place on campus where interested students could practice their skills with VR to prepare for a future in technology. “We noticed that at OU there wasn’t really a place to hone those skills or market them to employers,” Reece said. “We began to realize this was something quite a few students were interested in. So it’s our goal at OU VR to help build students’ portfolios and introduce them to career options they might not have had before.” Reece said he thinks VR is the future of the tech industry. He believes preparing students to work in this growing field is the first step toward making sure students can find jobs after graduation. To do so, the group works with several different VR systems, including Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Microsoft HoloLens. The group also uses a variety of programs for designing and coding projects, including Unity 3-D for a game engine, Adobe Photoshop to texture game objects and Autodesk Maya for modeling and animating. Carl Grant, associate dean of knowledge services and chief
technology officer for university libraries, agrees with Reece. Serving as the group’s faculty sponsor and adviser, Grant has worked with technology at libraries and universities for more than 40 years and believes knowing how to code for VR will be an invaluable skill in the coming future. “These are jobs that are really growing — virtual reality has taken off,” Grant said. “The entrepreneurs are saying, ‘Hey, this is ready to go!’ So they’re all looking for help. For people who are willing to dig into this, it’s almost an assured ticket that there will be a job waiting for them.” Grant also said the application of VR at the university will reshape how classes are taught. Grant said he envisions a future where astronomy students fly through space and hold planets in the palms of their hands, while budding architects walk through life-sized models of their buildings and biologists study the inside of an atom close-up. “Once we show the faculty what’s possible with the technology, it clicks,” Grant said. “Almost every single dean that experienced VR (at the Edge in Bizzell) uniformly said they want this in their college — they want their students to experience this and
know how to use it.” That’s where, according to Reece, OU VR comes in. The organization is open to any student who is interested, and as Reece said, the more diverse the backgrounds and majors, the better. Currently, the group is working on a VR colorblind experience. According to Young, one of the group’s co-founders who specializes in 3-D art, the experience will allow users to walk through an open meadow to an apple tree, where they can interact with the environment while listening to a narrative about the difficulties of colorblindness. “The whole point of the experience is to show people what it’s like to be colorblind,” Young said. “You’re going to have a switch that will allow you to change the color scheme from what normal humans perceive to a scheme that fits red-green colorblind people.” Young said the group is also excited about getting to work with the Microsoft HoloLens, a $3,000 piece of technology that focuses on augmented rather than virtual reality. The device constructs virtual constructs in the room around the user, augmenting what can be seen and interacted with. The HoloLens was given to OU VR by the OU IT store as a gift for the group’s dedication to
working with VR technology. People outside of the university have begun taking note of OU VR’s success. The group applied for a donation from Oculus, the company that builds the Oculus Rift VR headsets, and ended up receiving 10 headsets from the company, a gift worth more than $4,000. In the coming months, Oculus will host a next-gen workshop, where students from across the country will be brought to California to show off their work and discuss the future of VR. OU VR is competing for sponsorship from Oculus to send a few members to the workshop. In the future, Reece hopes the club will continue to grow and further the goals of students who want to work in the VR industry. “We’re now reaching widespread attention, and students know about us,” Reece said. “Students can come and get help with projects they want to create. We’re really looking to grow our scale to support as many students as possible.” The group meets at 5 p.m. every Tuesday and Friday in the visual lab at the Tom Love Innovation Hub. Heath Kuykendall
kuykendallheath@ou.edu
Presidential selection differs from Boren’s Faculty remember less secrecy in 1994 search timeline NICK HAZELRIGG @nickhazelrigg
In a private Norman home one spring day, thenSen. David Boren sat down with roughly 15 OU faculty and staff members before the 1994 announcement that he would serve as OU’s president.
While there, Boren answered questions from faculty members and shared his vision for what the university could become, according to Paul Bell, dean emeritus
of OU’s College of Arts and Sciences, who helped arrange the gathering. Now, 24 years later, OU faculty members can do little but wait to meet the new leader of their institution as the search for Boren’s successor is conducted behind closed doors. Bell was at the university in 1994, and he painted a starkly different picture of the selection of an OU president then from the one unfolding now in 2018. “ Faculty memb ers thought he would be a good president, and they looked forward to the possibility of the coming year. Of course, no one was sworn to secrecy,” Bell said. “Everybody
was free to tell everybody that they knew, that they had met with Sen. Boren and that he was coming here. So if it was a secret, it was a very poorly kept secret.” With members of the presidential search committee sworn to a lifetime of secrecy regarding the search, as well as the Board of Regents vowing to uphold the same level of secrecy, most OU faculty members will likely not know the name of their new boss until he or she has the job. In a statement sent to The Daily from university press secretary Matt Epting, Boren said there wasn’t any sort of formal meeting, but he did meet with faculty members
at a “social occasion.” “There was no organized meeting with the university community,” Boren said in the statement. “A personal friend invited me to a social occasion at his house, which included some faculty and staff members.” B e l l s a i d t h e c u r re nt search process for OU’s next president does not at all parallel the search that brought Boren to the university, and said a university president taking over without meeting with the faculty first is “dangerous.” “The candidate will have zero exposure by the time he or she is announced. Boren had a lot of exposure. By the time Boren’s candidacy was
announced, half the people in Norman knew about it. It wasn’t a secret,” Bell said. “Lord knows, as a public servant, his life was pretty much open to everybody’s scrutiny. There wasn’t a whole lot out there that people didn’t know about David Boren.” Despite the 1994 search’s circumstances, one of the most fervent supporters of a confidential search is Boren himself, who argued in an op-ed sent to The Daily in February that a confidential search is the best way to bring qualified candidates to the table. He pointed to himself as an example, saying his career in the Senate would have been “severely damaged” if he had participated
in a public contest. Alan Velie, David Ross Boyd professor of English and OU’s longest-serving faculty member, said he remembers some were worried about Boren’s lack of experience in higher education, but those worries were quickly extinguished. Velie was not present at the private gathering. “Well, initially there was some concern that he hadn’t had a lot of experience in the university. But he did such a good job right from the start that the concerns disappeared pretty rapidly,” Velie said. “The thing that made him an exceptional see SEARCH on Page 3