Edith Cowan University is employing Teleport to bring new educational experiences to students in various fields of engineering.
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ECU’s School of Engineering is always looking for new, innovative methods for teaching more effectively, and see virtual and mixed reality as high potential technologies. Already using Varjo’s mixed reality headsets, the school explored Teleport to expand its educational tools.
The main challenge with regular photos in teaching is that they are not good at providing detail, or understanding of real world scale. While this has traditionally been solved with on-site visits, the time, logistics and costs that go into them, especially with larger groups of students, make them hard to do frequently. A/Prof Rassau wanted to provide engineering students more experiential learning opportunities, helping them develop real-world understanding of certain kinds of industries, equipment, and locations, such as industrial and construction sites. So he set out with the goal of “bringing sites to students, rather than students to sites” through development of virtual reality site visits.
To achieve this, A/Prof Rassau had previously explored other 3D scanning and photogrammetry solutions, but had found them lacking. Low-end 3D scanning solutions were cheap, but lacked the sense of immersion needed to provide better learning experiences, convey a sense of scale and presence, and movement in these environments was not natural.
On the other hand, high-end photogrammetry and laser scanning were either prohibitively expensive, or, in the case of photogrammetry, far too time consuming as it requires a lot of pictures, post processing, tweaking, and so on. In addition, trying to render it and get it to a VR headset at reasonable frame rates, was just not feasible.
These challenges led A/Prof Rassau to try Teleport – an application that enables anyone to create immersive, detailed 3D site tours with just an iPhone. Students can easily explore Teleport scans in virtual reality or on their computer.
When A/Prof Rassau tried Teleport for the first time, the ease of use of the intuitive iOS application and its output quality immediately convinced him. “Teleport offers almost photographic quality, but in proper 3D, where you can walk around the scene. The ease of capture is also way, way better when compared for example to photogrammetry. What takes 30-40 minutes to capture in Teleport, could easily take 2 days if I tried to achieve it with photogrammetry.”
After scanning several environments and objects with Teleport, A/Prof Rassau finds that it achieves his key requirements of ease of use and high fidelity that are vital for interesting teaching outcomes. “Teleport crosses the threshold of fidelity required to feel like you are really there. The best captures are almost true to life.”
In addition to simple, browser based exploration, the scans can easily be used with VR and XR headsets as well. Users can walk around freely and naturally within the captured scene, providing students an even deeper sense of immersion and understanding of real-world scale during the virtual site visits.
A/Prof Rassau is looking forward to creating even more scans for students to explore so he’ll be able to show students numerous different environments, improving their learning experience. In the future, Rassau sees that Teleport could easily become a gold standard that enables something truly revolutionary for several use cases and industries beyond higher education – such as construction site inspections and training, real estate, tourism, and any industry using digital twins.
