Building Immersive Metaversities with Steve Grubbs of VictoryXR

Steve Grubbs is the CEO and Co-Founder of VictoryXR, one of the world leaders in virtual reality educational product development. He founded VictoryStore.com, ChalkBites and Victory Enterprises. Steve is also YPO Member.

Early in life, he served as Chairman of the House Education Committee in the Iowa House of Representatives and passed the largest technology funding bill in state history. More recently, he chaired the YPO Technology Network for two years.

Steve is now working to create a place for virtual reality curriculum in schools. He has degrees in business and law from the University of Iowa.

Recommended Resources:
Google News
Metaversity Disruption by VictoryXR

Transcript

Alexander Sarlin: 0:05

Welcome to Season Two of edtech insiders, where we talk to the most interesting thought leaders, founders, entrepreneurs, educators and investors, driving the future of education technology. I'm your host, Alex Sarlin, an edtech veteran with over 10 years of experience at top tech companies. Steve Grubbs is the founder and CEO of victory XR. After founding the company in 2016. Steve led the team to win the Global Education Innovation of the Year award in 2021. Victory XR offers immersive classrooms and campuses through virtual reality which allows students to interact in a synchronous virtual environment while educators are given training and the library of over 6000 3d objects with which to teach a variety of subjects to their students. Steve is a serial entrepreneur who founded two other successful ventures and was also a state of Iowa legislator from 1991 to 1997. serving as chair of the House Education Committee, Steve Grubbs, Welcome to EdTech insiders.

Steve Grubbs: 1:16

Happy to be here.

Alexander Sarlin: 1:18

I'm really excited to chat with you today. Your company victory XR is one of the leading builders of Metaverse, experiences in education, specifically, often these sort of twin digital twin University experiences. So I just want to open it up by saying what is a digital twin University help our listeners understand what you do?

Steve Grubbs: 1:41

That's sort of the big question, you know, so we call the metaverse cities because it's a university in the metaverse. And what that really means is that it is a persistent 24/7 synchronous, multiplayer space digital world that is 3d simulated that allows students and professors and educators and staff to gather for learning coursework for after school studying for entertainment for competitions. And so our belief is that you can and should learn in both worlds.

Alexander Sarlin: 2:22

So when a student logs into the med diversity version of their existing University, can you give us a little sense of what's sort of the first experience they might have?

Steve Grubbs: 2:35

So there's two different types of med diversities. There's the digital twin version, which, where we build an exact replica of a portion of their campus, usually that portion that includes their quad, or maybe the commons, whatever they have that sort of Ikonics will rebuild that and we have the buildings there, and they can go into the classroom. So you know, when I went to college, I would hop on to campus and I'd walk into class, they can do the same thing here. So they walk into class, their their teacher, their professor, their other students, they sit down and they begin class and you know, maybe it's a chemistry lab, maybe it's a cadaver lab, maybe it's a an astronomy class, where you take a trip to a starship, it's a heck of a lot better than the real deal. So that's the digital twin version. But a lot of schools just purchase the template, the basic version, you know, we have a campus with 70 classrooms. And because it's virtual reality, we have the luxury of building the classrooms, we want to go to school. And so for example, you know, most of us learned Darwin and evolution. And you know, for me, you know, I there's a video I sat in a row of chairs, there was a book in front of me, I read the book, I looked at the pictures. Okay, fine. In our class, you know, you start on the HMS Beagle, which is, of course, the ship that Darwin traveled the world in. you disembark at the Galapagos Islands, where you explore until you, you find the finches with their beaks and the giant tortoises and all of that and learning along the way, it's a little learning pods everywhere. So when we say learn in both worlds, certainly we think that in the future, there will be a bias towards learning in an immersive 3d simulated world.

Alexander Sarlin: 4:19

It sounds like one of the Theses here, which makes sense to me from my instructional design background is by immersing students in an experience where they can get as close as possible to the authentic sort of epiphanies, that let's say, you know, Darwin had as he took his ship to the Galapagos, you're going to make the learning stickier, you're going to make it more tangible. You're going to make it really come alive in a way that reading a textbook or seeing a slideshow or even a documentary could never do. How has that been going so far? I think it's a terrific idea.

Steve Grubbs: 4:54

There are two interesting studies that talk to the efficacy of learning in the simulated virtual real All the world's the first that I saw was out of Kyoto, I believe out of Japan. And essentially what they did was, they did a brain scan, measuring EEG, electrical activity in brains, you know, one when students are sitting in the class to when they're learning online, and then the third when they're learning in VR, and of course, you know, the brain just lights up when people are learning in VR, you know, when you, when you spark wonderment in students, suddenly learning comes alive, and they're more likely to retain that information. The PwC study took the same course material and measured it against online learning, classroom learning and VR learning. And what they found was it took less time to learn in VR dramatically less, and students gained greater empathy for the material that they were learning. So you know, you think about, you know, my father was a public school history teacher, and I actually had his He was my teacher in my junior high middle school for slavery. And, you know, I can remember learning slavery in eighth grade. And you know, okay, I learned slavery, but it wasn't as impactful as when I watched the miniseries Roots, which really personalized it, you know, now we can do that in a dramatically more powerful fashion through virtual reality and, and you really gain a greater empathy. And I like to talk about leadership, we're able to help students achieve two things, one, learn communication skills, and to improve critical thinking. But the third important thing for great leaders for successful leaders is empathy. If you think about Hitler, he was a very successful leader. Unfortunately, for the whole world, he had no empathy, he easily killed 6 million people, what we really want to develop our leaders that are good communicators, good critical thinking, and also have empathy.

Alexander Sarlin: 6:52

We spoke on on a tech insiders to practice Labs, which is a enterprise VR software specifically to build empathy in the sort of diversity, equity and inclusion space where you take on these authentic scenarios, from different perspectives. And it strikes me that empathy and the ability to sort of picture yourself there is one big advantage of VR versus many different kinds of learning another is literally memory. These amazing studies, you know, memory champions almost always use this place based technique, the methods of loci to remember everything, they picture themselves in spaces and connect things to the space. I'm curious if you either know, through studies or even anticipate that place based education, remembering the big ol remembering the islands versus trying to remember a paragraph of a textbook is going to have effects on people's ability to recall and retain information.

Steve Grubbs: 7:51

You know, the PwC study is like 40 pages long, so it can't talk about the whole thing. But if you Google the PwC, virtual reality study, it'll come up, but it talks to that it talks about the power of immersion, and place and learning by doing so all of those things dramatically contribute to greater retention, greater understanding, greater empathy, and a student who loves to learn. I mean, we all had those classes that we loved least most of us did. Then also those classes we hated. We can have more classes that are loved and fewer classes that are hated. I think that's better for everybody.

Alexander Sarlin: 8:33

Yeah. How many Metaverse cities has victory XR built so far? And what is the pipeline look like? How is this been scaling over time.

Steve Grubbs: 8:42

So last year, we had to Morehouse College in Atlanta, one of the great HBCUs in America and Fisk University and other HBCU. In Nashville, they're really on the rise today. By the end of this year, we expect that we will have 55 colleges and universities signed up now, about half of them will have digital twins built because that's an added expense. And the other will simply use licenses to access our basic campus. So you know that growth from two to 55, in just a little over a year shows that there's really dramatic demand for this product. And for obvious reasons. And if you think about it, most schools now have an a remote online learning program. How do you teach chemistry through zoom? How about biology, about nursing medtech even history or literature. So for example, in our literature section, we took the book To Kill a Mockingbird, really important book and read by almost every high school junior senior in the United States and even some around the world. So we rebuilt the courtroom so that as you finish the book, you can have your discussion. In the courtroom. Some students might Sit in the balcony because they were not allowed to sit on the floor. Others might sit on the floor and understanding that there was a two class society and that two different classes were on trial here. And then you can sit in the judges chair, other students can be lawyers, other students can sit in the jury panel. But when you discuss the book, and you can even launch closing remarks by Gregory Peck, it's sort of in in Avatar form. So sort of fun. But if you think about really understanding books, that really is a great way to do it, and it's in it's how immersive education will transform not just really the obvious use cases like science, but also the less obvious use cases like literature, writing history.

Alexander Sarlin: 10:44

That's amazing. I had a little bit of an epiphany about Metaverse education in talking to Monica Rose of Mehta who I know is a partner of victory XR, and in some ways, it went a little like this. And I'd love to sort of throw this your way and hear you respond to it and correct any misconceptions I might have, which is some of the benefit of having a meta University, which could be as you say, a digital twin or a little bit more of a default template university that it doesn't match the actual campus is that it becomes an entry point to the metaverse that is shared among all the students in the university. And it's an entry point that mirrors in some ways the campus experience it's you know what they call skeuomorphic. It uses the college as a metaphor for the metaverse, but it becomes a access point to many, many, many different types of Metaverse experiences. So rather than sending students directly into To Kill a Mockingbird, or into you know, a spaceship, you start on a campus, with your classmates with an instructor or TA or any kind of facilitator, and then together launch into these amazing in depth Immersive experiences. And that sort of to tears feels very exciting to me as a way to make the transition to Metaverse education cleaner and easier to understand and easier to actually wrap into student experience. I'd love to hear your response to that. Is that on target off target? Somewhere in between? A couple

Steve Grubbs: 12:17

of responses. You know, first of all, today, we have a siloed set of meta verses. So people say, Oh, it's not a true metaverse. Well, fine. You know, there was a time when people that native people who lived in North America, were not traveling to Europe, and Australia. But over time, pathways developed between the various countries. It's the same thing with all the various Metaverse as you know, you've got alt space and horizon and engage and so many others out there for Bella. And so over time, pathways will develop between these various meta versus connecting everybody and then, you know, slowly over time that differentiators will fall away to commonly accepted practices. And our Metaverse campuses are met, diversities are one of those places that will ultimately connect up with the rest of the world and with AR campuses. But the second point is, you know, one of the cool things about how we are able to deliver content immersively is that, you know, we will build these 3d graphically simulated spaces, which might be an industrial kitchen, it might be Dinosaur Island for the paleontology people, all sorts of cool places. But we also travel the globe, shooting 360 video. So these aren't just like your standard 360 video, these are high end graphically enhanced sound effects the whole thing. So now a professor can teach a course in a cadaver in a graphically simulated cadaver lab, and then can take the whole class on a 360 field trip to an actual cadaver lab, or something a little less painful for some people, you might want to learn about the history of China, for example, and then take a global field trip to the Great Wall of China and stand on the Great Wall and look to the east, where the Mongols would invade and then look to the west where you know, China protected themselves and it's just a fantastic way to learn.

Alexander Sarlin: 14:23

It really is and that layer of shared experiences. So the Great Wall simulation, the cadaver lab, the kitchen, those are things that can be built at a very high quality and then students from any university and any medical university can access them. So it reminds me a little of it not to be old fashioned but of the textbook model where instead of every university having to write their own textbooks for their students. You get a system where one set of professors and academics writes a sort of textbook that becomes the go to gold standard for the field and maybe it's a you know, chemistry textbook and then Every university has the opportunity to buy it and use it for their classes. And it feels like the metal versity, there's a little bit of a parallel, they're building this amazing evolution experience on the Beagle. And the Galapagos could be used at in high school classes and college classes in all sorts of different majors and all sorts of different ways at many different universities. So you can build it once and use it many times. And that gets me excited from a scale perspective,

Steve Grubbs: 15:25

allowed 10,000 institutions to use it. And so you know, that saves a lot of development time. I mean, nobody would go out and try to build their own car. Maybe somebody would, but why do that when Tesla has built a perfectly good car for me to drive, so I'm gonna buy Tesla's car, and others get into that space. So you know, you'll have a small number of providers, and people will aggregate around those providers, we expect to fully have 1000 colleges and universities within five years.

Alexander Sarlin: 15:55

It's amazing. So you're mentioning the cost of development, which is often cited as one of the potential hurdles to get over to have a sort of widely adopted metaverse. How do you see that ecosystem evolving? So you have companies like victory XR that are building 55, Metaverse, cities, that's an amazing niche and thing to be able to build? Do you see game studios or other VR companies sort of coming into this space and thinking about education as their beachhead, that I'm going to build the best X learning experience? And that'll be used by every metal versity? Or every college campus? Or are people still a little bit shy to think of education as their core use case?

Steve Grubbs: 16:39

You know, that's an interesting question. When we first started this in 2016, everybody was all about gaming. And when I see the commercials from Mehta on television, it's still about gaming. But the real sticky value of immersive virtual reality or augmented reality is learning and trading. And even though the uptake might be a little slower, the great thing about it is I only have to build one, human cadaver and 10 years from now, that human cadaver will probably still be anatomically correct. As far as gaming, I can build a game today, but in five years, people will stop playing, and I'll have to roll out a new version and update or a different game altogether, you know, Angry Birds had a great run. And so we liked the fact that we can build something once and it has a very long shelf life.

Alexander Sarlin: 17:32

That's a really interesting point. And, you know, I think that speaks to some of what we think about in edtech, about different subjects for learning. There are some evergreen subjects, like, as you say, anatomy, where it doesn't change very often, if at all. And there are others, like you mentioned training, if you're training to install a solar panel, for example, well, that is actually a training that may need to be updated every five years. I'm curious how you think about those sorts of different types of topics, do you focus on the Evergreen areas to start and then sort of think about ones that might change? It's interesting,

Steve Grubbs: 18:09

it's like drug development. So you can create a drug, but you want to have a large enough universe of people who need it, so that you have a chance to get payback on your investment. That's a problem with people who have rare diseases where there's just like one out of every million people who has it, because there's just no payback. And so the government's done some things to subsidize the development of drugs, the orphan drug law, for that small group of users, it's the same thing for what we're doing, you know, The Big Easy use cases are in biology and chemistry and those, but occasionally, we get grants that subsidize the creation of content for places of learning where there may not be as much demand. And that's important. Well, but you got to make payroll. And so if you're going to payroll, you got to figure out a way to provide a product that there's demand in the marketplace. So that's my job as CEO is to figure those things out. But also to be sensitive to those situations where learning is needed. There's just isn't as much demand for it.

Alexander Sarlin: 19:15

And when you mentioned, To Kill a Mockingbird as a book that's in virtually every high school in the US, I think I hear that kind of logic. It's like, well, let's start with something that everybody can use. And then over time, some of the more niche topics are very, I love this drug discovery metaphor, the rare diseases in education, the rare things that are being learned by forestry app, it takes a while to get that audience is not that big. So you need a certain number of users to be able to justify the cost. I'm curious if you've seen the cost of development for VR and AR going down over time such that we might imagine a world in which there is a dedicated VR or AR application for even rare topics.

Steve Grubbs: 20:00

So in many ways it has gone down. And in other ways it hasn't. So for example, cost of hardware has fallen dramatically, you know, you used to have to buy a $1,500 computer to tether your $500 headset to it. So you know, 2000 bucks, you know, then the quest two came out and quest one 300 $400 A year into the game. So hardware is dramatically less, there are also more producers globally. So every single day, I have a studio that reaches out to me saying, Hey, we can do your modeling or your coding or whatever the case might be. Now, we have a really solid team of modelers and coders that are on staff. But at the same time, we are able to outsource some of our modeling work to international companies that they're able to keep costs reasonable. And so we do a lot of that.

Alexander Sarlin: 20:51

And a metaphor that jumps to mind for me is web application. You know, in the early days of the Internet, very few people knew how to build their own website, especially of any size or complexity. So it would be this specialized skill, it would cost a lot of money. And then over time, the more and more studios were created, more and more tools were created until it became quite easy for a teenager to make their own website or, you know, sort of the web 2.0 world. I am really hungry personally for to sort of get us to that Metaverse 2.0 world where anybody can create their own Metaverse experience. If you had to put a timeline on that, you know, you mentioned that the studios are starting to come out of the woodwork, you can outsource and Pete their studios in different countries doing modeling? When would we imagine seeing that a teenager who's really interested in some specific topic can build a learning experience on their own just like they can build an app right now or a website right now.

Steve Grubbs: 21:51

Yeah, you know, Roblox is pretty close to that from a 2d spective. Obviously, they're a huge player in the market. And we think that we're going to see them doing a lot more there. The form of their objects is a problem for learning, which needs hyper realism and a lot of cases, you don't want to blocky, cumin, Oregon, you know, and hyper realistic. So that remains a challenge. But we expect that within 12 months, we'll have the base model of a build your own learning space for students where they'll be able to come in and use a drag and drop menu to build, you know, what we start with, we'll see. But this is what we're working towards, and others are working in the same space. So I would bet that you see some pretty good build your own tools in the next 12 months.

Alexander Sarlin: 22:40

That's incredible. I think a follow up question to that would be So will there be such tools for professional educators, which is maybe a sort of layer in between, like when you do a meta versity? For you know, Morehouse? What is the role of the professors and instructors and adjuncts at Morehouse in the meta versity? Can they customize the experience? Do they guide students through it? Can they build their own anything yet? Or will they be able to?

Steve Grubbs: 23:08

Yeah, so they construct their own courses, what we provide them are the tools. So first of all, we have a professional development training program that we don't need to create the courses of the curriculum, there are 10s of 1000s of college courses around the world that have already been created with a lot of thought, what we need to do is to have a platform where a professor can say, Okay, I teach biology, I teach inorganic chemistry, I need X, Y, and Z to make that happen. So we provide, like I said earlier, almost 70 classrooms that they can choose from, they choose the classroom that's going to fit best for this particular lesson. And they might use different classrooms for different lessons, then they need 3d modeled objects, we have, you know, we're approaching 9000, 3d modeled objects that they can choose from. So you know, if they need molecules, if they need human organs, maybe they're doing comparative anatomy, and they need the organs of a pig and the organs of a human. All of that is available. In some cases, they need actual simulators. So you go from the learning space, to the static 3d models to simulators. Now simulators require a lot more effort and time. So we initially built the 50 most common surgical tools is for med tech and nursing tech. Right? So the mayo scissors, you know, there's you look at these things. And I don't know how anybody knows the difference. But that's why this training is important. But then you need actual machine and equipment simulators. And so those simulators might be you know, if you've ever been with somebody in the emergency room, they always hook those machines up to, you know, checking their oxygen level, their heartbeat, all of those things. And we're deploying these machines that act as simulators so that those nursing and medical and other places medicine can practice So with low consequences for failure practice using this very specific simulators.

Alexander Sarlin: 25:07

So that's incredibly interesting. And I'm wrapping my mind around this sort of layered approach that you just mentioned the learning space, which can be a classroom and one of 70 classrooms prebuilt the learning objects, which can be organs, or tools, or anything you're actually studying, and then these specific simulations. So I don't know if this question makes sense. But imagine a professor of Emergency Medicine came to you and said, I want to create a really high stakes gamified learning experience where a patient is rushed in, and they have a certain kind of problem, and you have to save their life using the tools at your disposal. Is that something they could build? Now, given the pieces that you've just mentioned? Or would that take custom work? Or would that take partnership? Where are we at and sort of the maturity of being able to create a customized experience like that?

Steve Grubbs: 26:02

Well, the answer is, it depends, of course, because there are 1000s of pieces of medical equipment, and we're just working to get the first 50 done, if the most common working from the 8020 rule, you know, 80% of procedures, use 20% of the machine. So you know, we sort of start from that perspective, there's a company in the world that works on ophthalmology, so they're already knocking all that down. So there's a lot of that on its way. But if we were starting at a point where there were no books, and that's where we are with a learning in virtual reality, you know, there are no models. We started with no models, no simulations, no classrooms, and they're all being built out by us and many others.

Alexander Sarlin: 26:44

That makes sense. It's a really exciting sort of inflection moment. And do you envision that once these models are built, like the mayo scissors that you mentioned that victory XR has modeled out and that work like mayo scissors? Is that going to be a piece of code that is shareable in the ecosystem? Can you imagine somebody putting that into a Roblox or a horizon world? Or is it that everybody's going to have to build their own library.

Steve Grubbs: 27:12

So they're already libraries out there that you can acquire. So when a college or university professor comes to us, and they say, come in and teach this course, so like southwestern Oregon Community College, one of our digital twins, they said, We're going to teach forestry, we did not have many forestry objects. So the first thing we do is we look through our database of 9000 objects, what do we have, that they can use, or that's close enough to be a good use? Then we go to the public stores out there that say, Okay, we're going, you know, let's shop and see if we can purchase these 3d models. So those are available out there to everybody for feet, then we say, well, strike one, strike two, let's build it. So you know, we, you know, you're, once you look at a tree, you gotta be able to see the rings of different types of trees and count back. And so you know, some of those things had to be modeled. But it's still the last of three options, but it's how we keep adding to our content library.

Alexander Sarlin: 28:11

It's amazing. And then once that forestry experience is built, is it proprietary? Or is there any chance or sense in which maybe others could leverage it again, for a fee, possibly from you?

Steve Grubbs: 28:24

Yeah, we're thinking about that model. We're not quite sure how to proceed. Job number one on our part is to figure out a way to break even, we barely broke even last year, I think we'll barely break even this year, but every year, we try to figure out how do you how do you bring in the amount of revenue required to cover the salaries and wages of the people that are building all of this? So how would you suggest is one of those things that we've discussed many times? Are we better off sort of releasing it to the public and having people pay a fee or license fee? Or are we better off signing up people to work in our proprietary environment? And for that particular question, we have not come to a good answer yet.

Alexander Sarlin: 29:05

It's such a new ecosystem. I think there's so many unanswered questions. It's part of why I think it's endlessly fascinating right now just seeing how it evolves. When I think of that forestry use case. You know, is there a world in which the park rangers can go around their parks with these amazing new devices and map be mapping every kind of tree? You know, as a one time could the government sponsor, the US government say we want every type of native tree in the US to have a virtual reality counterpart, and we're going to put $10 million into the Park Service to do this, like, Am I in just in completely science fiction land to think about something like that? Or could we imagine something like that happening? It's for the public good.

Steve Grubbs: 29:47

And the federal government's already doing that, not specifically for forestry. But they have done that, for example, for the Smithsonian. So many of the Smithsonian artifacts have been scanned in turn And into 3d models that are available for use by the public. So, you know, not nearly enough. But, you know, we've got a great skeletal Mastodon, so that was from the Smithsonian. And it's an actual replica of the actual woolly mammoth they have on display, you know, so you could walk around, you couldn't get close to it, and look at it just like you could if you traveled to Washington, DC,

Alexander Sarlin: 30:25

it's amazing. So there are listeners listening to this, who either work in the higher ed ecosystem and say, This sounds really interesting. I would love to talk to my administration about a digital twin or a diversity campus, or a professor who's thinking, Oh, wow, I'd love to learn more. How would you recommend that somebody start to get their head around this new world in a way that can then be explained? It's I think people who get really into this stuff can sometimes seem like they're out on an island, you know, sort of explaining this amazing new world that could be and people don't always realize that this stuff exists that they're, you know, as you say, there's 55 universities already making these, these Metaverse cities. How do we get to that tipping point where this just becomes something that universities do and they understand instead of, you know, one visionary in some department trying to make it happen? Yeah, the

Steve Grubbs: 31:17

first thing I would do is introduce them to Dr. Messina, Morris, the director of Morehouse men diversity. Morehouse College is the leader in the space. They teach more courses, full courses in the metaverse than anyone else. And they're successful. No, in fact, there's a case study where Professor ovale, Hamilton taught world history, and he taught it in his brick and mortar class. Then he taught it through zoom. And then he taught it on his meta versity campus. And then he measured three things at the end of each course, student satisfaction, student engagement, student performance, all three of those engagement, satisfaction and performance, the meta versity performed head and shoulders above the other other two options. So Dr. Musina Morris is the director of Morehouse med diversity. And she is very generous with her time mentoring and providing input to others that are interested in moving into this space. So that's the first thing I would do is make that introduction and one should connect with her on LinkedIn as well. And maybe the second thing is on our YouTube page, the victory X our YouTube page, we have over 200 videos that that show what the digital twins look like that explain the digital twins that explain the Morehouse College case study. So if someone wants to grab a video and say, Hey, Dean, we would like you to consider this, then they could just simply grab a video and push it out. And if a picture's worth 1000 words, a video is worth 100,000 words. That's a good way to explain things. I also have a regular column that I write on medium. And, you know, there's a lot of good reading material there for those that want to dig in and understand some of this better, and they prefer to read. So those are three options. And of course, our website has a ton of information at Victory xr.com.

Alexander Sarlin: 33:13

We will put in the show notes for this episode, links to all of the studies and resources that Steve is mentioning here, including the PwC study that he mentioned earlier, as well so that people can really get their heads around it. Let me ask one follow up question on that. I think one potential point of confusion or questions that university admins might have is, okay, if we build a meta versity, how will students access it? Do we have to buy them headsets? Do we need a new office just to do tech support on these headsets? How does that whole Access Point work? And I'm sure this is something you've talked a lot about to a lot of different universities. So maybe you can help explain, you know, what is the device management recommendation, if you want to get your students into the metaverse? Yeah,

Steve Grubbs: 34:01

that's a great question. And it's got a great answer. There's a diversity of hardware that can access these you know, our preferred is a virtual reality headset I always compare, you know, there you can look at the postcard that your aunt Hazel sends you from the Grand Canyon and looks pretty cool. Or you can stand personally on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and you old its majesty. You know to me having a virtual reality headset really allows you to behold the majesty of of what's happening inside that campus. But having said that, you can also access it through a MacBook or a PC. It's sort of like if you've ever played Call of Duty or seen people play games in 3d simulated worlds fortnight for example. You can move around in those spaces using your keyboard or a mouse and, and you can it's a great experience. Having said that there are things you can't do if you're accessing through a can pewter, because when you're in virtual reality of use of your hands, you have use of your hands when you're accessing through a keyboard. But for those who don't want to access it through VR, and there are plenty of people like that the PC is a great option. And University of Maryland global, Dan Mintz and David Johnson are doing amazing work over there. They're a fully online school. And in their effort, what they're figuring out is that they'll have a course and some specific classes they offer through the PC, because it's just not necessary. They don't have any particular activities that require use of hands. And then others, they encourage the students to go ahead and put on the headset and join them inside. So you know, there's this iterative process going on where people were educators are figuring out the best ways to approach it. Sounds like

Alexander Sarlin: 35:53

there's a spectrum of access points. And let me ask you about phones, can students access the universities from their phones?

Steve Grubbs: 36:01

They can, as long as they have a robust browser, so any late model, iPhone most late model androids will work with it.

Alexander Sarlin: 36:10

Gotcha. So phones and laptops, which are tend to be semi standard equipment for many college students, not not all will allow students to access Metaverse experiences. And then to get the full immersive experience with you know, hands on interactives, there needs to be some kind of 3d headset, but a school doesn't necessarily need, you know, one to one, they don't need a headset for every student to be able to make this work. They could have any combination of computers and phones, which students already have. And headsets when they want to go to the sort of fully immersive experience like at a hands on cadaver lab or a hands on when you're on the Beagle, and you need to measure the finches. I think that makes sense. And I think people can begin to wrap their minds around that. It's a logistical issue, but it's one that you know, can unlock enormous learning if itself.

Steve Grubbs: 37:03

device hardware is no longer an excuse for not accessing labs on a mere diversity campus, it's that those issues have been resolved. You know, sometimes people just want to find an excuse, and you know, may not be the right time for them. But that's one big issue that's been taken care of.

Alexander Sarlin: 37:20

Gotcha. So I want to ask one more question. Just go all the way back, you mentioned that there's two main types of Metaverse cities that victory, XR builds the digital twins, and you've mentioned that is sort of replicates the campus or certain iconic sort of unique aspects of the campus. And then more of a sort of a default campus where it has many different classrooms where you get lots of experiences, but it may not look specific to the university you're at. And that comes with, you know, that's a little bit less expensive, because it's some of the elements are off the shelf, I'd love to hear your thoughts about how universities are thinking about that choice. And when they want to sort of brand their metal versity with their own Clocktower, or their own statues, or the kinds of things that make your their football stadium or whatever makes their university unique, versus those who just want an access point. And they say it doesn't need to look just like our campus, it just needs to look like a campus. How do universities make that decision? And how do you sort of guide them?

Steve Grubbs: 38:27

Well, so bottom line is there are a lot of universities that have really iconic campuses. And you know, you don't have to go very far to find schools that have put a lot of money and time and effort into their grounds and their buildings. And, you know, I attended the University of Iowa, and we have the old state capitol right in the center of campus. And most big 10 schools, and Ivy League schools have that really iconic look. So because that that's part of the brand, it's important to schools, it's not that expensive, either it's you know, $50,000 to build an entire campus, you know, you can't build a, you can barely get chairs into a modern day classroom for 50,000 for a relatively low amount of money, university or college can build this wonderful digital twin campus, the launching point for students to go to class and go wherever else and have meetings and student organizations, etc. Having said that, a lot of universities are just trying to figure out what they're going to do, you know, NYU, they bought initial licenses, and they're just trying to figure out, you know, what this will look like for them. And once they have that figured out, then they'll pull the trigger or not pull the trigger. But that's sort of the difference, I think are those that really know where they want to go with it. And those that are, you know, testing things and trying to make a determination of how they want immersive and meta Diversity Learning to look

Alexander Sarlin: 39:55

that makes sense. And you mentioned the student organizations as a as a use case So this will be my my actual final final question just because I know we're running a little low on time. But this is so interesting. I feel like you're painting a very concrete vision of the future here. So in a use case like social events or sports events, or student organizations or other types of college activities that are not about specifically about classroom learning or learning at all, what have you seen happen in these Metaverse cities? Do you see? Frat parties? Do you see mixers? Do you see, you know, football watch parties? I'm curious how evolved. I think these will all happen in the future. But have you seen it so far? What is sort of happening outside of the learning space in these Metaverse cities?

Steve Grubbs: 40:39

So on the campuses that we work with Morehouse College, for example, conducted their own graduation ceremony for students in the metaverse, those that had gone through the med diversity program. If you look at for example, fortnight they held a concert with Marshmallow, the world famous DJ and 10 million kids showed up Roblox as. And I think more than 10 million showed up for that. So so what we know is that it's a gathering space for social, for entertainment, for competition, and all of those things are inherent on every college campus in the world. As the metaverse cities replicate real life, we will see all of these other pieces, also integrated in there as well as payment systems, you know, whether it's crypto or standard currencies, you know, other ways to interact, we're working with augmented reality glasses making AR meta versity a reality. So there's a lot of really, really interesting things it'll unfold over the next 24 months. Yeah,

Alexander Sarlin: 41:47

so you can imagine almost anything that can happens in an existing university could have some men diversity corollary, some of them already do. And they're sort of on their way. It's a really interesting vision of the future, I always end with two very quick questions. One is, what is a trend that you've seen, from your perspective in the tech field that you think is, you know, our listeners should keep an eye out for

Steve Grubbs: 42:12

I think, first of all, the big trend is immersive learning, and all of its forms, whether it's through a PC, or AR glasses, or just AR through your phone, there's so many tools, a lot of them are free, some moves do not cost that much money. So, you know, I would explore those various options and see how we can bring learning to life for students.

Alexander Sarlin: 42:34

Great. And last, you've mentioned lots of amazing resources that people can access to learn more about the university. But we always ask, is there sort of one or two go to resources that you would recommend for people who just are like, I had never heard about a meta versity? Until this moment? What would you recommend they go read? Or is it a newsletter or blog? Where should they start to really get their mind around this field?

Steve Grubbs: 42:57

So two things one, through Google News, I have an alert set up for several terms. So you know, the the field is changing so quickly, that it's easier to keep up with it through regular news than it is through like searching out an article as written two years ago. So that's number one. Number two, we put out a weekly LinkedIn newsletter. So if somebody is interested in that, just come to our Victrix our LinkedIn page and sign up for it, and that we try to aggregate the week's most important news and put it in that newsletter.

Alexander Sarlin: 43:33

Yeah, good advice. You're gonna feel moving as fast as this. You've just got to open up that feed and see what everybody's doing, especially across universities, share universities every two weeks one university is doing something that all the others can learn from. And you've mentioned a few in that space here. Steve Grubbs from victory XR, thank you for your time today. It's been a fascinating conversation. I'm just a flame with what this could look like. And I want to get into one of these bad diversities. I have never been in one yet. So I looking forward to that as well. Thanks for being here with tech insiders.

Steve Grubbs: 44:04

We have an open tour page every week for anybody who wants to join in we would love to have you join.

Alexander Sarlin: 44:10

I would love to join and we'll try to get that link as well to our show notes for the listeners of this episode. Thanks so much for being here, Steve. Really appreciate your time. Thanks for listening to this episode of Ed Tech insiders. If you liked the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the tech community. For those who want even more Ed Tech Insider, subscribe to the free ed tech insiders newsletter on substack.