
Daydream Labs: Teaching Skills in VR - janober
https://www.blog.google/products/google-vr/daydream-labs-teaching-skills-vr/
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vorotato
"no matter what warning we flashed if someone virtually touched a hot steam
nozzle, they frequently got too close to it in the real world, and we needed a
chaperone at the ready to grab their hand away. "

Obviously they need to "die" in game, a few times starting the whole thing all
over from the beginning and they'll never "burn" their hands again. I wish I
could tell the author this....

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andybak
> And no matter what warning we flashed if someone virtually touched a hot
> steam nozzle, they frequently got too close to it in the real world

Yep. I don't think they were trying hard enough to make the experience
unpleasant and memorable. If they didn't get further than flashing warnings
with various sizes and wordings then they were a little premature in this
conclusion.

And the comment about hand tracking is odd in that they haven't even
acknowledged the existence of Leap Motion - which would work fairly well in
this scenario (less of the occlusion issues that prevent it being a good
general purpose VR controller.

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hatsunearu
>Leap Motion

it's really crappy for VR. You need LOS to the base station, and obscured
digits don't show up. Also, the range sucks.

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andybak
They make a mount for sensor that puts it on the front of the headset and the
software corrects for headset position.

The newer model Leap Motion has 180 degree field of view so essentially - if
your hands are in front of you then it can track it.

The range only needs to be as long as your arms.

Some hand positions are self-occluding but this is a problem less often than
you'd expect.

Direct sunlight used to be a problem because of IR interference but this might
have improved (I haven't tried the it since last October).

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hatsunearu
I own a Vive headset; I do not have a leap motion.

The community opinion on leap seems to be negative. I was basing my argument
on that.

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hyperion2010
This will be extremely useful for teaching how to use 'always on' equipment
like big electron microscopes where the cost of training someone is enormous
if you have to give up time where the equipment could be running.

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Osmium
One of my 'someday' projects is a virtual electron microscope ... so much with
TEM becomes easier with hands-on experimentation, but that often isn't
practical (or even safe for the instrument without someone present to guide
you).

Trouble is, something like that requires a fair amount of domain knowledge to
code, and the intersection of people who can code and who also understand
electron microscopy sufficiently well isn't that large... but considering the
cost of the instruments, it'd surely be worth doing.

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andkon
This is funny. All I would've thought you'd need is a score, which you'd
increment if you get a shot of espresso out quickly, or decrement if you touch
a hot pipe. Let people figure out the rest!

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rangibaby
Make it boring. Touch the hot pipe and you have to call an ambulance, wait for
the ambulance, go to hospital, wait hours for a doctor (there are more urgent
cases...) get bandaged, have the cost of your medical care deducted from your
wages etc.

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siliconc0w
Anyone have a link to an academic-like paper? Would be interested to see the
details of the experiment (i.e % improvement with VR). We think so much about
teaching computers it's interesting that we still could have room for
improvement figuring out how to better teach other humans. Could we get 2x, 5x
or even 10x better at learning? What would that look like?

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thearn4
Something like this for changing drum brakes in a car would be great. Or
changing a baby's diaper.

It's probably not worth a headset for any single one of those tasks, but for
one that can be used with some training platform to learn any manual task,
that would be great.

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zitterbewegung
If they married teaching skills in VR for training and their Google Glass
enterprise that would be interesting. Train people to get the basics in a VR
that could potentially be done anywhere. Then augment them in the Enterprise
with their AR offering Google Glass enterprise.

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e12e
> In the end, it was much easier to model the trainer like a video game, where
> every object has its own state.

Uh? Making an interactive simulation was easier if made as an interactive
simulation? How could this possibly be a surprise?

It's not like we don't have simulators - flight training being the canonical
example.

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shostack
Is there somewhere I can download this if I own a Daydream headset and Pixel?

I happen to be in the market for a home espresso machine. I'm also interested
in learning the "craft" of it, and this could be a fun intro.

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brian_herman
This would make an awesome game!

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jdcarter
Check out "Job Simulator." It's meant to be entertaining and not teach any
real skills, but bears some similarities to what the article describes. My
daughter loves it.

