Discover the Ancient Rome in Virtual Reality
Ortal-Paz Saar uses the Yorescape application to let students experience what it was like to live and walk around in ancient Rome.
What prompted you to use VR in this lesson?
This year we started a pilot for using VR in a Research Master course I teach, on the topic of enslavement in the ancient Roman world. The course employs avatar teaching, meaning that students are immersed in the past by choosing, developing and working with an avatar throughout the course.
By adding a VR aspect, I had hoped to make their experience even more immersive, so that they do not only imagine the sights of ancient houses, monuments, and streets but are able to feel their scale, see their colors and sense their spatial context.
How did you design the VR lesson (structure and teaching methods)?
I tried to connect each VR-session to a specific topic in the course. It was not easy, because the VR was not specifically designed for our course. I did that by letting the students think more broadly about topics they would experience in the VR-session, e.g. visibility and invisibility within a house, or how would a child experience huge monumental buildings in antiquity.
How did the students respond to the use of VR?
The students were extremely enthusiastic. The vast majority had never tried VR before, so it was a whole new world for them. There were some recurrent elements in what they said about the experience. First of all, that they never imagined the colors of the ancient Roman world in the way they saw them with the VR headset. Second, students were impressed by a specific episode, taking place at night. They never had a chance to see ancient Roman sites at night (not in photos and also not archaeological sites that still exist), and the sight of oil lamp light, torches and starry skies made an great impression on them.
One student of the group did not enjoy the experience and would have preferred to watch a film on the topic, but this is also something that needs to be taken into account when working with immersive technology. Not everybody experiences it in the same manner.
What challenges or obstacles did you encounter?
For a pilot, everything went smoothly. Students and I were very grateful for the clear and friendly explanations that our VR-guide, Jim de Paauw, gave. In the future, it would be good to have more VR-headsets and the option for the entire class to work simultaneously, instead of two smaller groups of 6 students each. This caused some extra work, for example: needing to reserve two rooms, needing to move between them to see all is in order, the VR-guide needing to repeat the information twice, etc.
What advice would you give to a fellow teacher who wants to use VR?
First of all, make sure to experience yourself with a VR-headset all the VR-scenes you want the students to see. It is a totally different experience than when you watch them on your computer. Second, take into account that the sessions might last longer than what you expect, due to glitches in the system, the picture becoming frozen, etc. So schedule the class-time generously in advance. Third, schedule sufficient time in the class for students to discuss the VR-session they have witnessed.