Dylan (5) listens to John Savage explain the Hololens in The Workbench.
I WATCHED our two primary school children explore a realm of mixed reality in The Workbench of Limerick during a three hour hands-on event sponsored by Bank of Ireland, Action Point Technology and 3D Camp. Although the under-10s have walked around with VR headsets before, they've never enjoyed HoloLens with free pizza. It's an indelible memory.
The slide deck John Savage presented offers an excellent introduction to virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality and merged reality. I'm covering those concepts as part of the Emerging Trends module in the creative multimedia degree programme at the Limerick Institute of Technology. As proven by the reaction of the two youngest people in the audience, HoloLens offers an immersive educational opportunity for school students of all ages. This is not vaporware.
We (Mia and myself) recorded a minute of 360 video with the Ricoh Theta S camera. Editing multiple clips will become more difficult for me this semester since I'm returning a Surface Pro 4 back to Microsoft-Ireland. We were loaned the computer in support of the Youth Media Team and now are hunting for a replacement for our on-site video and audio editing. Handheld technology like the iPad Mini 4 and my Sony Xperia Z5 can do some of the basic editing but we need a laptop to incorporate transitions and text fly-outs in the 360 videos we shoot. However, there is strong merit in leveraging handsets and cloud services to produce quality content on the fly. That's what we did with a three-year-old iPhone 5C and the audio clip served by Anchor.fm.
There's a very easy learning curve involved in producing high quality 360 video for both YouTube and Facebook. The main takeaway from tonight's edit: give YouTube up to an hour to correctly render the 360 video for playback. A flat version of the evening's event is on Flickr (below) and Instagram. Another important takeaway: Safari doesn't play the 360 video so if you're using iOS, you should consider clicking on the video and viewing it inside the YouTube app.
I deeply appreciate John Savage, Technical Directory of Action Point Technology, taking an evening to present HoloLens to an gathering of interested people in The Workbench. Maria Walsh and Pat Carroll set up the excellent venue with pizza and beer provided by the Bank of Ireland. James Corbett conceptualised and promoted the event which showed another dimension of the global reach of innovation in Limerick.
[Bernie Goldbach teaches creative business in the Limerick Institute of Technology.]
