Objective
- Enable students to work hands-on with emerging tools and explore technology trends in a way that benefits their curricular activities, professional interests, creative expression, and education.
Strategies
Facilitating experiential learning through emerging technologies for students is a top priority for the Emerging Technology Studio (ETS). The ETS primarily supports academic work in the arts and humanities. Our approach to curricular embedment emphasizes transdisciplinary collaboration, innovation, creative problem-solving, and providing educational value to all students.
We work directly with department coordinators and individual faculty to plan for resource availability and their inclusion in the classroom depending on curricular needs each semester. Examples of these curricular-oriented efforts include, but are not limited to: providing ETS spaces for classroom activities and accommodating field trips that expose students to current emerging technology trends to explore how they relate to various topics in the arts and humanities. The ETS offers students the resources to explore these topics and work with emerging tools hands-on. This includes providing demos of different technical capabilities, as well as offering students an option to check out different equipment for use in class projects.
A big part of our curricular embedment strategy also entails collaborations on research projects led by faculty, in which case ETS can provide technical guidance and content development assistance for the project. To inquire about scheduling a class demo, field trip, curricular activity that involves reserving ETS spaces or equipment for large groups, please contact ets@osu.edu with a subject line "Curricular Embedment Proposal", or "Research Proposal" for potential research project collaborations.
Curricular Integration Examples
In Spring 2024 , the Emerging Technology Studio (ETS) hosted Tomas Dorta, inventor of Hyve3D, a collaborative tool for immersive co-design that blends the physical and the virtual environment. Dorta gave a presentation to undergraduate students in the Department of Design. Students had the chance to learn about the emerging technologies at the intersection of co-design and immersive visualization, which is very relevant to their current projects and future work in their careers. This experience provided the students with a chance to explore the process of working in 3D together and designing in a virtual realm without having to wear a VR headset.
In Spring 2024, Professor William Nickley partnered with the Emerging Technology Studio (ETS) to enable the students in Design Media II for Industrial Design class to explore collaborative visualization methods using mixed reality (MR), particularly virtual reality (VR). In their project "Chow Down", students were tasked with exploring an emerging media toolchain and collaborative VR workflows for conceptualizing a novel dinning experience.
In this collaboration, ETS provided students with Meta Quest 3 mixed reality headsets. The headsets were equipped with Gravity Sketch Collab, a 3D sculpting app which allows up to four students to collaborate simultaneously in realizing their shared vision in 3D. This project resulted in live demonstrations in which students explained their proposed meal experience and their design journeys using collaborative VR.
