I didn’t think we would be saying those words for many years but with the help of the fantastic Immersive Technology team at Tremough university campus in Cornwall England, Stozzys.com has now piloted its first story-writing workshop using avatars. We used technology that is changing so fast there are new options and virtual spaces available each day.
Arising from our passion for helping people to write stories and also to help them share them with others – because the transfer of human knowledge is a powerful and healing process – Stozzys.com has run workshops in community centres and care homes. During Covid, we switched to Zoom. We are learning all the time how best to create a space where people feel comfortable to share, and it is true that people are now understandably more and more reluctant to leave their homes. So what is it like to be in a room with other participants and with Stozzys.com officers, in fact to be in a beautiful room by a turquoise bay, yet this room is virtual-reality so you don’t need to leave your favourite armchair??
Patrick was a participant in this first Metaverse trial workshop and he said that he thought it was a great experience, fun and quite a head spinner. When you have a Virtual Reality headset on, your brain sees what it sees, and you are truly transported. I personally have never experienced anything like it and enjoyed the sense of being in a beautiful space with others – all of whom can be physically located anywhere around the world – whilst the Stozzys.com PowerPoint presentation was beamed on to one wall and ‘real humans’ joined us via a flat screen on the other wall. Will some people feel more comfortable sharing when they are presenting as avatars, rather than sitting in a room with others in real life? Certainly it saves on the cost of travel! What about when break-out rooms are created, and participants can have great control over their ‘environment’ – do you want to be amongst flowers or mountains or skyscrapers…?
Please do try out Virtual Reality whenever you can because it is fun to be transported to new worlds. Also the potential to actually meet others in the same shared space and work with them is a real game changer. At the moment the key hurdle is the need to buy a headset however we used to think it was an issue that everyone needed to buy their own phones and computers.
So thank you Rosie and Georg and the team at Immersive Technology for helping us get Metaverse ready and to increase our options so we can continue to reach out to those wanting to share their stories with others. We have much to explore in terms of creating safe spaces, and policies around the look of the avatars, and the emerging technology to run these virtual meetings. What is most exciting to me was the sense of having crawled inside the Zoom screen to actually ‘be’ with other participants … so we are ready when you all catch up!
The ERDF Immersive Business Project has established a new and unique immersive technology facility at Tremough campus, designed to enable SMEs in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly to access and benefit from Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR) technologies. Led by Falmouth University in collaboration and working collegiately with the University of Exeter, Immersive Business continues to ensure that SMEs can compete nationally and globally through the development and application of the next competitive edge, immersive technologies.