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Department ofArt and Art History

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VR Specialist Brian Smith Joins SCU Imaginarium

Uses training in art and computer science to make art more “experiential”

Uses training in art and computer science to make art more “experiential”

Brian Smith

By Riley O'Connell '19

Santa Clara University’s virtual reality lab, the Imaginarium, housed in the Department of Art and Art History, starts its second year of operation this fall. At its helm is Brian Smith, a VR specialist who joins SCU from Texas A&M University’s highly regarded Department of Visualization. Smith’s role at SCU encompasses all things VR: teaching the VR courses, managing the Imaginarium, supervising the lab assistants, and networking with faculty, students and VR industry professionals in Silicon Valley.

This year, Smith will teach the VR boot camp course (ARTS 197A) and a new course, VR Design Challenge (ARTS 185). Students in the new course will utilize VR and game design concepts to address issues of social justice, ethics, humanity or sustainability. The course culminates with the students developing a concept and vision for a VR project.

Smith is enthusiastic about the teaching opportunity. “I saw this job description and it was like someone read my CV and created a job based on it.” He’s especially pleased to be in the Department of Art and Art History since he sees himself as an artist using digital tools.

That two-pronged approach to creating art was fostered in Smith’s training at Texas A&M. While Smith was pursuing on his MFA there, Oculus announced its popular Rift VR system. Smith immersed himself in the Oculus developer tools to create custom VR controllers that “let people fully embody themselves into a virtual space.”

Virtual reality and augmented reality experiences are important creative tools for Smith. While early forms of VR began in the middle of the 20th century in aerospace and flight simulators, it has become a revolutionary technology in the past decade. Smith notes that VR experiences “you could only imagine being possible in science fiction a few years ago” are becoming much more available.

Most recently, Smith collaborated nine colleagues from the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine to create a project called Anatomy Builder VR. Created from scripted lessons from Texas A&M anatomy instructors, the application presents students with 3D scans of a wolf skeleton and a “sandbox space” of wolf bones, which students must then identify and assemble on the scan. Extremely detailed with muscles and markings, the system “allowed students to put the skeleton together in the wrong way,” which according to Smith was a major stipulation of the project, as they wanted to give students “the opportunity to fail.” The research team presented its work in November 2017 at the Siggraph Conference in Bangkok, Thailand.

Anatomy Builder VR has since been bought by Jaunt China for release this fall in VR arcades in China and parts of Southeast Asia. The application will be accompanied by mini games like what Smith calls “bone matching basketball,” in which players learn the names and types of bones in the wolf skeleton by repeatedly shooting balls containing the bones into hoops labeled with bone names. Smith says the repeated actions of shooting the bone balls into hoops generates better memory retention than simple flashcard memorization. He hopes the creative interactive project engages students more in their education.

Although being a college professor was not Smith’s original career path, he says the “environment of new things” drew him to teaching. “I like doing weird experimental things, which is perfect for academia because everyone’s excited to try new things. It feels like this is the right place to be working on VR, as [the Silicon Valley] is the nexus of everything.” In the lab, Smith is excited to collaborate with and mentor students from various disciplines, from engineering and the sciences to the theatre arts and philosophy, saying this cross-pollination creates “a lot more possibility for more cerebral experiences.”

 

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