Reinventing the Classroom | HP and Yale Team Up to Create a Blended Reality Future

Take a moment to wrap your mind around these Yale students’ astonishing projects in blended reality using a range of HP technologies, including Sprout by HP.

• See resin sculptures of very large (think meteors and planets) and very small (think microscopic particles) collisions, which produce new elements and forces at vastly different scales. Generating 3D printed artifacts from digitally simulated material collisions, the articles can then be scanned and new simulations created, transforming physical objects to digital and back again.
• The MindDesign tool, a CAD digital plug-in, and physical interactive interface, allows users to fabricate design ideas directly from their imagination. Users will be able to generate 3D models of their emotional reactions using sensor headsets and custom software.
• Experience the visual, acoustic, and tactile qualities of a multi-unit all-gender prototype bathroom.
• Create sculptures of rare and extinct birds for a bird museum from taxidermied birds using 3D scanning.

These four projects, plus several others, are the result of a groundbreaking collaboration between HP and Yale over the past six months, part of an effort to explore the frontiers of innovation in blended reality.

Blended reality for next-gen classrooms

Professors and students from a variety of campus teams, including the Yale College, Peabody Museum of Natural History, School of Art, School of Architecture, School of Drama, Department of Comparative Literature and Digital Media Center for the Arts, are using Sprout Pros, 3D printing, augmented reality, and virtual reality to test use cases for blended reality in classrooms, exhibit halls, and research labs. 

The applied research partnership with Yale University, headed by John C. Eberhart, School of Architecture faculty, highlights opportunities for HP’s thought leadership in higher education, linking our technology for blended reality with next-generation teaching, research, and learning.

HP’s most recent collaboration with Yale began in November of 2016 and will continue through October 2017, after which HP and Yale will publish a monograph titled “Making the Future: 3D in Academe” to be co-authored by HP’s Gus Schmedlen, VP of Worldwide Education at HP and John Eberhart, principle investigator of Yale University. 

“The HP Yale Blended Reality research program explores the frontiers of VR, AR and 3D in higher education at a world top 10 university,” shared Schmedlen. “We are very encouraged by the early progress on the instructional and research innovations and look forward to publishing the results this fall.” 

This partnership underscores HP’s continuing efforts to maximize learning outcomes, with a focus on planning, leadership, and total access to content for always-on, always-connected teaching, research, and learning.

Strengthening HP’s education brand

The project aims to explore how Yale faculty, researchers, and student use blended reality to push the frontiers of STEM and the humanities. It’s one of the ways HP invests in bleeding edge technology for classrooms, building a brand—especially for workstations, PC procurement partnerships, and immersive computing—on campuses while we also seek deep customer insights at a world top 10 university.

Aiming for deep customer insights through projects at Yale is natural, given long-standing and mutually beneficial relationships between HP and the United States’ third-oldest university. HP CMO Antonio Lucio has served on the advisory board for Yale’s Center for Customer Insights and is slated to speak at Yale in mid-April. 

Doug Warner, VP and Global Head of Tech Vision and Strategy at HP, was also at Yale recently, giving two talks to packed audiences for Yale Information Technology Services (ITS) on the topic future trends and the spirit of disruptive innovation. Doug was honored to be the guest lecturer at the Branford College Tea, a very special tradition at Yale, and spent the entire day on campus engaging with Yale faculty, staff, and students; talking and planning with Yale’s Education Industry Solutions team on the theme of Classroom of the Future.

Sprout Pros at Yale

HP’s signature Classroom of the Future and Campus of the Future are two efforts to explore possible uses of blended reality technology across AR, VR, and 3D printing. Louis Kim, Vice President Advanced Platforms Group at HP, leads efforts for Immersive Computing and HP’s Home of the Future, contributed five Sprout Pros for Yale students to conduct the experimental projects now being carried out by students and professors of art, architecture, neurology, and more. 

HP and Yale will be publishing the final results of the projects in October 2017 at the EDUCAUSE Higher Education conference in Philadelphia. That report will be printed on an HP Indigo digital press, of course. 

HP is involved with many other education initiatives and partnerships as well, such as Reinvent the Classroom, a joint program with Microsoft that includes Digital Promise Global and its network of Learning Studios for student-centered, experiential learning. Learning Studios in 60 schools around the world support advanced blended learning, international collaboration, and the maker movement in education. 

The importance of education can hardly be overstated—education is the single most important determining factor in human, social, and economic development, including gender equality, life expectancy, maternal deaths, and combating disease. 

HP’s commitment to education goes beyond market share. Educations is linked to vital human rights worldwide. Working closely with leading education institutions around the globe, HP is bringing learning into the digital age, empowering the students of today and tomorrow, and reinventing education as we know it.

To learn more about this story, go to http://blendedreality.yale.edu/