The Emergence of VR Support in Academic Libraries: Future or Fad? Why it Matters!

Written By Scott Spicer & Charlie Heinz

The academic library has long provided services, equipment, and professional expertise for accessing and learning to create multimedia in various formats, such as lantern and 35mm slides, photos, audio, films, and video games.

The emergence of Virtual Reality (VR) support services in libraries is a continuum of this tradition that offers new opportunities and challenges. In her book 32 Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality Programs for Libraries, Ellyssa Kroski describes various examples of VR applications, such as taking a VR field trip using Google Earth VR, using 360 VR to showcase library spaces and collections, and VR for creativity (2021).

This article describes terminology, benefits and challenges, creation support considerations, and perspectives on future directions for VR programming in academic libraries.

What is in a name?

Immersive technology adds digital simulations to our real-world experience. For the convenience of this article, when we talk about "Virtual Reality" or “VR,” we mean all of the terms for immersive technology currently in use, including mixed reality, augmented reality, and spatial computing. We use this terminology because "Virtual Reality" is the most recognizable term. However, we should discuss the differences between these terms.

Virtual Reality replaces our entire field of view and audio experience with a digital simulation. Augmented reality is mostly just the real world but with a digital object superimposed on the user's field of view. Mixed reality is a hybrid between virtual and augmented reality, where several digital objects are superimposed and are often interactive (Figure 1).

Spatial computing is the newest term and is preferred by Apple when describing the experience with their Vision Pro headset. It is the idea that the user's full field of view can be mixed with 2D windows, 3D windows, and full virtual spaces that can be stepped into. In other words, it is a seamless blending of virtual, mixed, and augmented reality.

Chart displaying the spectrum between virtual and actual reality, with augmented and mixed reality between the two

Figure 1 “Spectrum Immersion”

Benefits of Virtual Reality & Related Library Support Services

When a library explores a new service, it is essential to consider the affordances (gains) this service provides over current offerings. Two questions that library professionals should ask are: "What are the current and potential tangible benefits of Virtual Reality?" and "Why should media librarians and their libraries even consider services in this area?" Affordances may include:

  • VR allows individuals to feel like they are somewhere—or someone—else. These experiences can help build empathy. VR shares many commonalities with films but takes things to the next step by allowing an individual to more fully experience or even take direction in a real-world scenario that would otherwise be dangerous or impossible. For example, one could send a simulated mission to Mars before we put a person there.

  • Platforms such as Meta Horizons demonstrate the potential of VR to connect people virtually from disparate places, as a form of social media, or even as an immersive classroom in a virtual learning environment. The Apple Vision Pro also offers unique Zoom-like video conferencing in their spatial computing environment.

  • Tools such as Gravity Sketch, a 3D modeling tool in VR, allow students to prototype and sketch ideas with little concern for the cost of materials or fear of making a mistake. Creating this open, positive learning environment is essential to building student self-efficacy in skill-set development (Bandura, 1977).

  • VR is a valuable research tool. For example, health researchers can discover its potential in physical and occupational therapy, its application for training genetic counselors, or marketing researchers studying consumer behavior in a Metaverse-type virtual world, described as people with avatars interacting with each other in 3D spaces (“Metaverse”, n.d.).

  • VR services allow campus community members, including VR support professionals, to explore and learn about VR's affordances and best adapt these technologies and related services to their unique contexts.Challenges of Virtual Reality & Related Library Support Services

Challenges of Virtual Reality & Related Library Support Services

VR support services come with challenges, and every VR library-based support service will differ according to its institutional context.

Many challenges facing library adoption of VR support will be familiar to the media librarian community. Similarities, such as managing technologies that provide experiences, are rapidly evolving. Just as we moved in recent times from the VCR to the DVD player to streaming, Virtual Reality resources require the adoption of different physical technologies. Different immersive modalities (virtual/mixed/augmented/spatial) generally require different headsets. Each type of headset is typically a new expense in terms of direct equipment cost and indirect costs such as staff and user training.

There are also challenges regarding the significant costs associated with licensing VR content. Much of the currently available VR content focuses on personal consumer use, which presents challenges analogous to providing access to YouTube or born-digital consumer-streaming web programming platforms such as Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu video. This topic could fill an entire article, so we will briefly discuss it here. As with consumer-based video offerings, providing access to consumer-based VR content is a matter of library and IT policies and risk assessment.

Fortunately, librarians and their institutions have experience navigating issues of non-licensable streaming video. Also, more recently, an increasing number of content creators offer specialized VR applications designed for the higher education market with licensing options. In this instance, familiar considerations, including costs by FTE, unlimited simultaneous VR application access, and ongoing vendor support, can be negotiated through contract, an area where academic libraries excel.

Beyond costs, other familiar concerns include technical challenges and accessibility. For example, VR applications and the marketplace platforms from which they are delivered (e.g., STEAM and the Meta Store) are constantly updated, which can create technical and compatibility challenges, particularly for older-generation headsets.

Concerning accessibility, challenges such as incompatibility with glasses and motion sickness, in addition to the familiar lack of captioning or audio narrative description, run the risk of excluding some people who may otherwise be able to benefit from VR experiences. Fortunately, there have been some attempts to mitigate these concerns. For example, though not as practical for institutional service, prescription lenses are available for some headsets. In addition, manufacturers have added improved accessibility features, including those found in the Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro headsets.

VR also requires IT infrastructure and support. Unfortunately, the secured enterprise-level networks found on college campuses often cause issues when a headset needs to interface with a program running with a specific companion computer.

Not all VR challenges are as concrete as costs, licensability, VR technology upgrades/obsolescence, accessibility, and IT support. Even with all of these areas in place, as librarians and academic technologists we still need to be considerate of the content. Do we have a reasonable understanding of the types of content required to meet a user's specific needs and whether that content is currently available to us?

Finally, one of VR’s strengths can also be a challenge. VR immersive storytelling can powerfully connect the learner to the individuals in the story and be used to build empathy. However, learners must understand the difference between their feelings and someone’s lived experience. This problem is not new; as with film resources, VR specialists must be aware of learners' assumptions and whether the representations are accurate portrayals created by people with firsthand knowledge of the subject matter. An editorial by Seinfeld et al. in Frontiers of Psychology serves as an accessible, multiperspectival, entre into this complex debate.

Supporting User-Generated VR Experiences & Considerations for Creating Instructional VR Content

Libraries are well-positioned to assist community members with creating VR experiences. Equipment like 360 cameras and tools like SketchUp allows beginners to develop a quality VR experience with little development knowledge or expense.

One notable example in Minnesota is the work of a retail merchandising class (RM 3244), where students created mock immersive grocery stores in SketchUp that are automatically converted into an immersive VR environment that allows students to walk through their creations while wearing a headset. Student feedback has suggested that the VR mock-ups helped students learn valuable design subject knowledge, such as applying sustainable building materials in their design. Students have also reported belief that the skill sets they learn in designing their grocery stores, coupled with knowledge about VR creation in their profession, will last beyond the course. As evidence of this potential, a former RM 3244 student who, after submitting their project in a national contest, became a finalist and won an internship with Kate Spade (Campbell-Jensen, 2022).

Some libraries have also begun to offer more advanced VR experiences for their communities, such as creating customized, interactive applications. Though this type of service has the potential to meet a great demand, as campus members often need help finding commercial VR content that meets their specific needs, high-end professional quality VR development requires considerable investment and depth of expertise. For example, creating interactive VR experiences requires access to and knowledge of tools such as Unreal or Unity gaming engines (figures 2 & 3). Patterson describes some illustrative case studies of this higher-end library-based development in his book Profiles of Use of Virtual Reality in Medical Education (2020).

Graph showing the growing spectrum of difficulty between 360 video on one end and interactive VR simulation on the other

Figure 2 “Difficulty in VR Experience Creation”

Bar chart showing the time to learn the basic skills of VR creation tools, with Open XR taking the longest.

Figure 3 “Estimated Minimum Time to VR Creation Tool Learning”

The VR Program at Minnesota

The University of Minnesota Libraries' VR aspirations began seven years ago with the addition of makerspaces and VR capabilities at the Walter Science and Engineering Library and Health Sciences Library. The Libraries’ VR program is likely unique among academic libraries because our services are open to external community partners and University-affiliated students, staff, and faculty. As with any library service, supporting multiple constituencies comes with considerations, but working with a wide array of communities allows us to observe the potential of VR in multiple rich contexts firsthand.

In the future, we look forward to cultivating more connections with in-class learning, more opportunities to foster community in our VR spaces where everyone has a sense of belonging, and providing an environment for students, teachers, and researchers to discover the value of Virtual Reality. It would not be unreasonable to wait to see how these modalities settle into mature forms. Still, we want to take advantage of the opportunity to discover meaningful uses of Virtual Reality in higher education and, in a small way, help steer it in the right direction.

Citations

Scott Spicer & Charlie Heinz

Scott serves as Media Outreach Librarian for the University of Minnesota Libraries (Twin Cities), where he heads the Libraries Media Services program. His primary responsibilities include course and personal growth skill-set support for media creation use of educational media resources and assisting with the UMN Libraries VR program. He has studied, published, and presented various media-related topics in higher education, including the benefits and library support of student-created media, educational media resources, media literacy skill set development, multimodal scholarship, and VR.

As an Academic Technologist and VR Program Lead, Charlie is responsible for developing Virtual Reality services and resources, including workshops, class instruction, equipment checkouts, project consultations, and open hours at our Virtual Reality Studio. What drives him is facilitating moments where someone gains the confidence to do something new or is open to new possibilities.

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