From the Centre Daily Times:
Have you ever dreamed of traveling to a remote, ancient village in Europe, but never had the time or money? Have you ever wondered what it would be like to perform lung surgery without ever setting foot in a hospital?
With Penn State’s new Center for Immersive Experiences, those experiences are becoming a virtual reality for students and faculty of all disciplines.
Alex Klippel directs the center, located in Pattee Library, which staffs a team of nine developers and five-10 student support workers. Together, they provide technology and learning tools to experience and create virtual reality, augmented reality and 360-degree video.
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Penn State has designated immersive technologies a strategic planning priority over the past few years. As a result, Klippel and his team have been able to bring content to various disciplines using immersive technology. They created content for and worked with introductory biology and geosciences classes to provide virtual field trips to places like Millbrook Marsh and natural gas fracking sites on Marcellus Shale formations, then studied the technology’s effects on their performance, he said.