Northern College goes virtual!

Northern College is continuing to find ways to utilize new technology in their classrooms.

Now, virtual reality isn’t even off-limits as the college now has two rooms dedicated to it.

Will Durocher is a Professor at Northern College.  He says to start, this technology will be used in programs having to do with the trades, such as getting a virtual tour of a mine, installing electrical circuits in a home and doing a carpentry inspection.

He says there’s plenty of excitement with VR, being in it’s early stages.  Durocher adds where VR is now, is where the Internet was back in the 90’s.

“You can imagine this technology over the next couple of years and becoming much more advanced,” he said, “Right now, you can use a lot of the virtual reality technology on your mobile phone…it’s the exact same computer components, exact same technology.”

“As we get better phones, we’ll get better VR as well.”

Many people are aware of the popular mobile game Pokémon GO that was released in Canada last summer.

That uses augmented reality.  Durocher says the both will have the same amount of hype, but they will become indistinguishable.

“You’ll just be wearing a normal set of glasses or contact lenses and you’ll be able to switch back and forth between augmented reality or virtual reality at your discretion.”

Durocher says at the moment, VR is very custom and done in short bursts, but if the technology develops further, you might even see less usage of such things as the keyboard and mouse at your desktop in favour of workers opting for VR to perform tasks.

Stephen Saarinen—the college’s former Marketing and Communications Officer—did much of the programming and developing for these rooms working for Axiom VR. He says it all took about a month or two to come together and is happy with the result.

“We built them using Unreal engine, which is industry-standard game development software, but it can also be used for these sorts of simulators.”

He says it gives students an opportunity to use pieces of equipment or using techniques that may be too dangerous in real life.  It also gives more students a chance to learn.

“We can boot up the simulator, they have all the parts built in CAD, we have the proper CAD files so they’re working with picture-perfect parts and actually working on stuff that we wouldn’t have the opportunity to do otherwise, so it’s very cool.”

The VR rooms are active and the college is hoping to use this as soon as this fall.