The College was praised for its innovative use of virtual reality to accelerate learning and skills acquisition.
The Sustainability Showcase is an annual award ceremony that celebrates leading environmental projects happening across the University of Cambridge. This year, Lucy Cavendish College received the Excellence Award for its pioneering use of virtual reality.
Lucy Cavendish Fellow and Lab Director, Dr Chris Macdonald, says “We are using VR in a variety of ways. We used it to better translate and visualise climate data in a project titled Making the Invisible Visible. This not only helped to simplify and visualise the data, but it also helped to make it interactive where students could, for example, ‘climb’ the emissions of common products, ‘traverse’ land use metrics, or ‘hold’ greenhouse gases.
More recently, we have been using VR to help students and researchers with public speaking. In service of this, I created the VR Public Speaking Platform. On the platform, users build resilience through a self-paced gamified journey where virtual reality training audiences increase as tasks are completed. Users can work their way up to the final VR practice stage which is inside of a virtual stadium in front of thousands of photorealistic spectators. As a result, users can transform into highly confident and skilled public speakers.
We are delighted with all of the positive feedback and support that we have received thus far. The Excellence Award is the fifth award we have won in just over two years and we are being increasingly invited to exhibit our work across the country. The Virtual Reality Public Speaking Platform in particular seems to be incredibly popular and is clearly addressing an unmet need, so we are focused on improving and scaling it over the coming months. If you’d like to try it out for yourself, we will be exhibiting at DigiGov, the British Science Festival, and New Scientist Live later this year.”
