The cardboard goggles cost around $8. Their delivery took weeks. And when the students saw each other wearing them on Zoom, they laughed.
“It’s really low-tech,” said Jennifer Birkeland, assistant professor of landscape architecture in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. “You use this cardboard viewer and stick your phone inside it, and a series of apps lets you capture virtual environments. Then the rest of us can log in and essentially look at each other’s ‘photospheres.’”
Normally, the master’s students in LA 5020, Studio Composition and Theory, would spend the semester redesigning a public plaza in Syracuse, New York. This semester they pivoted to reimagine spots near and dear to their hearts – and their homes. Virtual reality not only allowed them to see and experience each other’s projects, it helped energize students who were demoralized by the abrupt end of their time together on campus.
“It feels like were taking little field trips around the country – we’ve been to L.A., Oklahoma; I’m in Michigan, a few people are back in Ithaca,” said master’s student Monica Rourke, whose own project focuses on a stream through her property. “You have a sense of hopping around.”
The landscape architecture class, part of the first year of a three-year master’s curriculum, aims to help students understand spatial relationships through physical and digital drawing. Virtual reality, already widely used in architecture to present proposals or to experience international sites without traveling, provides a new way to help students reach their goals, Birkeland said.
“Virtual and digital environments are not necessarily superior, but at a time like this when nobody can go anywhere, it gives you a sense of place,” she said. “I’m just trying to get them to think like designers and be able to craft a narrative and build their argument, but I’m also trying to prepare them for that job interview after they graduate.”
As always, the students will present their final projects to a jury of professionals.
“Because Ithaca’s so remote, it’s often challenging to get outside critics to take two days off and get on the campus-to-campus bus,” Birkeland said. “Now, the fact that everybody’s home and everybody’s available means I can call really great designers and academics and say, ‘Hey, do you have an hour?’ and they say, ‘Of course.’ So the students are getting really awesome feedback.”
To some students, the isolation was a greater challenge than the VR. “We’ve all grown up in an age with rapidly changing technology, so I think we’re all used to incorporating new technology into our lives pretty seamlessly,” Rourke said.
The experiment sparked spirited debate about the pros and cons of digital tools, Birkeland said.
“There was a great discussion about the limits of technology, and how you might make virtual reality more sensory,” she said. “They’re starting to really see what tools are available, and how they can adapt and problem-solve. The VR has given them a little more agency. They’re inspiring each other.”
