VR journey begins for students on Lethbridge College Island

By Lethbridge Herald on April 2, 2022.

Herald photo by Al Beeber Lethbridge College instructor Tyler Heaton uses virtual reality equipment at the launch of an integrated learning opportunity involving four teams of students who will learn how to work, play, game, entertain in the metaverse.

Al Beeber – Lethbridge Herald

A group of Lethbridge College students are embarking on a virtual educational journey that will land winners of a competition paid summer internships with Aftermath Islands.

Twelve students in three programs will work in teams to creature structures, businesses and complete transactions on Lethbridge Island, a virtual space in the metaverse.

They will have six weekly challenges with the winning team being announced on June 3.

Partnering with David Lucatch, President, CEO and chair of Toronto-based Liquid Avatar Technologies and co-founder of Aftermath Islands Metaverse, the college program will teach students about entrepreneurship and building in the metaverse.

Liquid Avatar Teachnogies has provided the the college with 9,000 plots of land collectively called Lethbridge College Island, said Cherie Bowker, chair of LC’s School of Spatial Design Technologies.

Students in Interior Design Technology, Virtual and Augmented Reality and Architectural Animation Technology are involved in the project in which teams will take on various challenges in coming weeks.

Liquid Avatar Technologies is “building out a portion of the metaverse and they’re working with three of our program areas,” said Bowker Friday in a launch of the program.

“We have set up teams that are going to compete to build out Lethbridge College Island so we’re creating a virtual campus,” Bowker said.

The four teams will have one student from each of the three program areas “so they’re multi-disciplinary,” said Bowker.

“Every single week there’ll be a new challenge and at the end the winning team will an internship with this company. So we’re so excited.”

Lukatch will be giving the students the weekly challenges in sort of a “Survivor” style format, said Bowker.

The competition runs a total of six weeks.

Mike McCready, an instructor in Virtual and Augmented Reality and the program research chair for the Spacial Technology, Applied Research and Training centre, said “the idea of building virtual worlds, there’s a lot of complexity because it’s more than just creating the 3-D models and the assets. It’s considering how people interact in those virtual worlds and how you can recreate some of the social interactions that you might experience in the physical world.

“It’s going to take people with an eye for design, art, and colour. It’s going to take developers who can write code and program, it’s going to take project managers, it’s going to take designers who can think about the experience and what that experience will look like and how people will interact.

“There’s a lot of competencies required to create virtual worlds,” said McCready.

McCready said VR has been around for awhile but it is getting “a lot of traction for a number of reasons. One, because of the pandemic that we’re in but also with some focus on large companies investing their own time and money into these virtual worlds.

“It’s come to a critical mass point where there’s a lot of explosion of interest recently,” he added.

“There’s a lot of companies who are investing in virtual worlds both from just a recreational activity but also from a business kind of activity as well. The business element is still being defined. I think what’s interesting is these virtual worlds are the conduit or axis point but how are we going to have these transactions? How are we going to have the business transactions? That part is still being defined and it’s an exciting part to be a part of,” he said.

Speaking by Zoom, Lucatch said winners of the weekly competitions will be announced each Thursday.

While the winning team will get paid internships with Aftermath Islands, Lucatch said said there will be other opportunities for students to participate on special projects.

“This is an amazing opportunity,” he told students and their families who gathered at the college.

“We want everyone to be part of this process,” he said.

Each week teams will have to use three rendered items in the challenges.</body>

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<cutline> Herald photo by Al Beeber

Lethbridge College instructor Tyler Heaton uses virtual reality equipment at the Friday launch of an integrated learning opportunity involving four teams of students who will learn how to work, play, game, entertain in the metaverse.