ASU students create new VR experiences for Global Futures course

You’re standing on an Arctic ice floe, and you can see the sun glinting on the ice crystals. Suddenly, a large bear lumbers past and you do a double take — why is that polar bear brown?

This scenario is part of a new virtual reality component in the Exploring Global Futures course at Arizona State University, offered by the College of Global Futures and powered by Dreamscape Learn. 

The course, CGF 494, which will be open to any student on campus, fulfills the university's new sustainability requirement and will be offered in the spring 2025 semester. Course registration is now open.

In the class, students access several immersive experiences, including visiting the Arctic to measure the thickness of the ice and replenishing a dying coral reef in the ocean off of Hawaiʻi

The virtual reality components were designed by student workers in SPLIT Studio, which stands for Student-Powered Lab for Immersive Technology. The studio is housed in EdPlus, the ASU unit that designs digital teaching and learning models to increase student success.

The SPLIT Studio team used the technology and storytelling power of Dreamscape Learn to create the modules.

Dreamscape Learn is a collaboration between ASU and the virtual reality company Dreamscape Immersive. The Dreamscape Learn experience has been used in biology classes at ASU for a few years and is now expanding to courses in other disciplines.

SPLIT Studio creators worked to make the scenarios as realistic as possible by consulting with faculty members Stephanie Pfirman, deputy director and Foundation Professor in the School of Ocean Futures, and Peter Schlosser, vice president and vice provost of Global Futures at ASU, both of whom have done several research expeditions to the Arctic.

The process required lots of back and forth between the faculty and the designers. For example, Pfirman, who also teaches the course, gave the designers her assessment of whether the ice was realistic-looking: “I said, ‘Oh, that doesn't work. It’s grungier than that.’ ”

According to Pfirman, there will be six immersive-experience modules in the course, which will help students see how decisions in the past created the conditions of today and to envision different scenarios for the future. 

Sometimes the virtual reality experience feels fantastical, even when it isn’t.

In the Arctic experience, while viewers measure the thickness of the ice floe, they cross paths with two strange creatures — a polar bear that’s brown and a beluga whale with a tusk.

“That is a ‘narluga,’ which is a cross between a narwhal and a beluga,” Pfirman said. “And polar bears and grizzly bears are interbreeding to form ‘grolars,’” due to climate change-fueled migration. 

Both are real.

“This is something that is going to be happening more frequently, although it hardly ever happened before,” she said.

The goal is to think about responsibility.

“We’re in this situation because of choices people have made in the past, and that's empowering because if we make different choices now, it can change our future,” she said.

Virtual reality also allows students to time travel and see how these complex ecosystems have changed and could further change based on what happens next.

“This is really important because it's global futures — not global future. We want people to see that it’s not one size fits all. It’s important to be able to envision scenarios and evaluate their implications,” Pfirman said.

Another goal was to create a sense of wonder in the students, who may be taking the course to fulfill the sustainability requirement and not necessarily out of passion.

“The VR is taking them places that they would never consider going,” she said.

In the coral experience, viewers descend into the ocean in research pods, pluck out some colorful, healthy coral specimens from among the dying, bleached reef and then transport the samples to a coral nursery. After fast-forwarding in time, the students reintegrate the healthy nursery corals back into their native habitat and see the reef come back to life.

The assignment is important for students so they feel empowered to act and not pessimistic, Pfirman said.

The SPLIT Studio student team is led by Auryan Ratliff, director of creative and emerging technologies for EdPlus. He started creating extended reality content for EdPlus while he was a student worker in 2015, around the time that the Oculus virtual reality headset came out.

“I bought my own, and I was the person who was coming into the office with this headset saying, ‘Everyone needs to play with this. This is the future,’ ” he said.

He worked with other units at ASU on extended reality content and immersive experiences. Along the way, he graduated with his degree in graphic information technology, began hiring student workers to help, and SPLIT Studio was created.

At first, the lab worked with vendors on extended reality and gamified experience.

“Full-time expertise in this field is very rare. We don't have a large game-development industry in Arizona, and it can be very costly as well. So going to students made a lot of sense,” he said.

SPLIT Studio serves three clients: ASU Online, Dreamscape Learn and external partners.

This semester, nine students worked on different jobs, including 3D art, user-experience design, development and game design. 

“The purpose of SPLIT Studio was to build a resource for our instructional designers and faculty so that they can execute their ideas in the way they are imagining it. They don't need to sacrifice quality or nuance,” he said.

“We understand the VR, and we merge that with the expertise of the faculty. They define the learning objectives. They’re providing all the data points. We do design sessions with them and pull out unique ideas that make sense for the course as a whole.”

For the coral experience, the Split Studio team collaborated with Greg Asner, director of ASU's Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science, based in Hawaiʻi

On the Exploring Global Futures course, the team worked to make the immersion as close as possible to the professors’ real-life experiences, including the loss of ice over the years, Ratliff said.

“In the audio design, at first you can hear big chunks of ice hitting each other under the water — these big, bass ‘booms.’

“When you go to the future scene, all you hear is water lapping on the ice. And that is really effective.”

Neel Madhav Dogra, a senior majoring in computer science, works in SPLIT Studio and helped design the sound for Exploring Global Futures.

“I coded sounds into the experiences, making sure the different sound effects were triggered at the right point,” he said.

Dogra started by doing his own research, listening to recordings of the Arctic on YouTube.

“I picked up that the sound of ice breaking is like a big ‘whoosh,’ so I added that in.

“Then the faculty provided feedback, saying, ‘Let’s make that more frequent.’ ”

Dogra, who has worked at SPLIT Studio since he was a first-year student, is now working on game programming for other modules in Exploring Global Futures. He would like a career in software engineering or game design — or even as a full-time employee at SPLIT Studio.

“I have had internships and I tell people that there's nowhere like SPLIT Studio, where people are close and they work on such meaningful things.

“Working at SPLIT has really helped me because I know how to work on a large team and on large-scale projects with many stakeholders. It’s fun to know that the work I’m doing is out there and students are using it.”