Science in Virtual Realities with Michael Angilletta

In this episode, Amanda Niehaus chats with biologist Michael Angilletta about his collaborative work building virtual reality science labs with Hollywood-born Dreamscape Immersive, student engagement through story, and the power of immersion— as well as Amanda’s aphantasia and Mike’s hard-learned rules of surviving the Zoom era.

Michael Angilletta is President's Professor and Director of the Center for Science Learning Innovation at Arizona State University. Mike established an international reputation first as an evolutionary biologist studying adaptation to climate change, which resulted in an award winning book called Thermal Adaptation. Now, Mike works at expanding the use of digital learning technologies, such as adaptive courseware and virtual reality. And his team has launched the first online program to confer a Bachelor of Science in Biology, which now serves more than 2300 students. Mike is working with corporate partners such as Cogbooks, Labster, Google, and Dreamscape Immersive to promote evidence-based practices in cutting edge technology.

The Science Write Now (SWN) Podcast is a 3x/monthly podcast for people who love science and the arts. If you’re interested in learning more about great books, plays, and films; writing, research or editing; the lives of scientists; and creative insights into contemporary science; then you’ve come to the right place!

The SWN Podcast is hosted by Amanda Niehaus and Jessica White and produced by Taylor Mitchell with funding from the Australia Council for the Arts.

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Our opening song is 'Balmain' by Pure Milk: https://www.triplejunearthed.com/artist/pure-milk.html

Transcript

Amanda Niehaus  11:42  
Michael Angilletta is President's Professor and Director of the Center for Science Learning Innovation at Arizona State University. Mike established an international reputation first as an evolutionary biologist studying adaptation to climate change, which resulted in an award winning book called Thermal Adaptation. Now, Mike works at expanding the use of digital learning technologies, such as adaptive courseware and virtual reality. And his team has launched the first online program to confer a Bachelor of Science in Biology, which now serves more than 2300 students. Mike is working with corporate partners such as Cogbooks, Labster, Google, and Dreamscape Immersive to promote evidence based practices in cutting edge technology. Thanks for being here today, Mike.

Michael Angilletta  12:35  
A pleasure Amanda. The bio I gave you is a bit outdated. We now have more than 3300 students in that program.

Amanda Niehaus  12:43  
Wow. That's awesome.

Michael Angilletta  12:44  
Yeah, it's huge, growing, it's good, blowing up.

Amanda Niehaus  12:48  
Well done. I should also say up front that Mike and I are like long, longtime friends. So

Michael Angilletta  12:55  
Yeah, we've known each other for well, I'd say, 2006. Right.

Amanda Niehaus  12:59  
Yeah, that's right. When we went on a field trip to Brazil together. Is that when we first met?

Michael Angilletta  13:07  
Yep, yep. You came out to Indiana, where I was working at Indiana State University, and stayed at my house, you and Robbie for I don't know, a week. And then we went to three weeks on fieldwork in Brazil. And then we came back afterwards back to my house. Yeah. And we published a bunch of stuff from that. 

Amanda Niehaus  13:26  
Yeah, that's right, on leafcutter ants, which is fun. Um, and also crickets, which was less fun, I think. 

Michael Angilletta  13:37  
Leafcutter ants are way cooler. 

Amanda Niehaus  13:41  
Yeah, no, that was such a great trip. And actually, I want to talk to you later - help me remember I want to talk to you later, a little bit about virtual reality experiences versus fieldwork experiences, because I know that you and I are both the kind of people in our evolutionary and ecological careers who have really enjoyed being out in the field and interacting with animals in their environments. So. But before we get ahead of ourselves, I would love for you to share with us a bit about what kind of work you're doing in the virtual reality sphere with Dreamscape Immersive.

Michael Angilletta  14:23  
Yeah, sure. Let me back up and say that I wouldn't have been doing any of this stuff if it hadn't been to do to do with the push to take our biology programs online. And so it's all quite accidental because as as you know, when you met me, I, I didn't think about online programs or online teaching at all. In fact, it probably wasn't even a thing back then that was widely done. And when I became - I took an administrative job at my university - I became in charge of the undergraduate programs there. There was a really big push from the administration from the top down to expand enrollments online. And we were basically told that we had to develop online programs in the sciences. And the pushback from below was always well, how are we going to do a degree in science online, like completely at home, what we say asynchronously, meaning they could do the work anytime - at midnight, you know, early in the morning - every student can choose when and how much work to do at any particular time and move at whatever pace they want to do. 

And many people throw up their hands and say, well, that's just not possible. We have all these lab courses. And the lab courses use very expensive equipment, they use dangerous chemicals, they use sophisticated techniques, how you supposed to get somebody to do this work on their own asynchronously. And one of the one of the ideas was, well, we could send these kits, box up some chemical equipment, stuff like that, and send a kit home, and that works for basics, basic experiments, maybe non majors classes, or you could have them go buy a list of groceries and do some basic things with chemicals that you might buy at the store. But it doesn't really cover the full range of things that you want to do in any degree program in the lab. So we started to explore options, and one of the options we explored was virtual reality. What if you could partner with a company that would customize lab experiences in virtual reality for your program, so that students could go anywhere and do anything but in a virtual world. And that was all it was actually quite accidental. Because at first, we were thinking about a bunch of software tools that are done on a 2d screen like I'm using right now, like you're looking at your computer, I'm looking at my iPad. And imagine we might use a software tool where we simulate some experiment. And we're just seeing a 2d version of what happens. And we interviewed a whole bunch of companies that made these experiences. 

And then one day I discovered a company that does those experiences, but they also did VR versions of them. And they showed me, they brought to the meeting a pair of VR goggles, and I put them on. And it was crazy. Because I was lost. I couldn't come back to the meeting. So my director tapped me on the shoulder - Mike it's time to come out. And they had a Cirque de Soleil experience. So like there's all these circus performers doing things all around you, and everywhere you look, something was happening - up above, down below, behind you. And it was incredible. So I was immediately hooked. And I said, it would be awesome if we could build every lab like this, because there's no constraints, like if I feel like I'm immersed in it, and I'm a faculty member, why wouldn't a student that's half my age and actually grew up with this kind of technology - grew up with video games and grew up with YouTube and all this technology that students have today - they would probably feel equally or more immersed, and it wouldn't feel weird to them. And so I started to work with this company, this company called Labster. And they started to work with a bigger company who everybody knows called Google. And they got funding to build a whole bunch of virtual reality labs that we could use to launch our degree program, and we made three courses. Each course had 10 labs. And the faculty at Arizona State University worked closely with the Labster staff, and developed these lab courses, and that we use those in our degree program and that many people throughout the world are using these labs now, that Labster makes, so they've been quite successful with this. 

But since then, their virtual reality version of the product I think has dropped off because they use Google Dream, Dream, Daydream Goggles, and I don't think Google supports these anymore, so you know, everyone's using Oculus now for most virtual reality applications, I think, the real popular ones. And so that was the first stint into virtual reality. And because of that, one day, I received an email and I was asked to go to a meeting by the president of the university with a special visitor and I had no really idea what this was about. And then there was an attachment with information about the visitor. And it turns out, the person I was supposed to meet with was a Hollywood producer. And he produced 50-some films and he made all these movies I watched, like, starting with WarGames, which he wrote in the early 1980s, with Matthew Broderick, which, if you're 52, like me, you - War Games, you grew up on a movie like that - and then he went on to make movies like Gladiator and the whole Men in Black series and The Ring. This this guy worked with Steven Spielberg, his name's Walter Parks. He ran Spielberg's Amblin studios, he ran DreamWorks Studios, so big shot, so I was a little nervous and really excited at the same time. And I was asked to show them what we did with virtual reality, not knowing at all what was going to happen from this. And I got 15 minutes to meet with with him. He met with a whole bunch of people that day when it came to university and a whole bunch of a team of came in with him from his company and the company's called Dreamscape Immersive and they are a cutting edge, virtual reality company. So like a step ahead of anything I had seen. And I was showing them what we had done for our labs with last year at Google. And they listened very attentively and asked some questions. That was good conversation and then 15 minutes later, they left. I thought, well, I guess that went well. Who knows?

And then two weeks later I get a call - Again, we need you to meet with the president for 15 minutes. I assume it's related to this last thing, but I had no idea. And I was told, we just signed an exclusive deal with Dreamscape Immersive to form a company called Dreamscape Learn where we - ASU - would be the education arm of how we would use their technology to teach and develop educational products that we could distribute. And so we want you to go out there immediately, like as soon as possible, experience this for yourself, and then come back with how we could build the best biology class in the world that uses virtual reality. And so that was both very exciting, but very scary, right? Me because, you know, now the stakes are really high and [...] at the same time, but everybody in the university sort of focusing on what are you going to do? And we were lucky enough to have that shot, because now we we got all this investment from the University in our program. What are we gonna do with it, you know? And everybody's watching us. 

But since then, it's been an incredible roller coaster ride. And I have to say, I've learned a lot, I know this is an area that interests you a lot, I learned a lot about storytelling, I learned a lot about how to merge storytelling with education. I learned a lot about how to make effective stories through music and, and through characters. And, you know, this is not my area, you probably know much more about this stuff than I do. So I learned a tremendous amount, working with these folks that come from a Hollywood background, and they want to teach your stories. And oftentimes, we don't, right, for textbooks. Sometimes we talk about the people that did experiments, but you know, they're fairly dry. They're not narrative driven from the beginning of a textbook to the end of textbook, and the chapters don't even really tell a continuing drama, right. Whereas now, we would be building these kinds of narrative arcs for everything that we did with very specific rule sets that we have to use to develop those as the what motivates a person to keep paying attention, or to wonder about what happens next. And so it's all about drama. And so it's been a very exciting experience. Now, I'll pause because that was a long version of saying how I got into this.

Amanda Niehaus  22:05  
Oh, no, that's so exciting, though. What an amazing opportunity. And just like, like you said, just to come out of nowhere and be able to be part of this. So this, this guy who who runs Dreamscape Immersive, has he has he left Hollywood movies now? Is this kind of his focus? Do you know?

Michael Angilletta  22:29  
He has a production company with his his wife, and I know she is still actively producing things for television. And they may have movie projects. But I think largely he's focused on this company Dreamscape Immersive right now, and they have work in both the training area for government - so imagine you want to train military or you want to train police in the public sector. Virtual reality is a great tool for training, to put people in experiences and situations that you can put them in repeatedly so they can practice how they might respond to unique situations that might happen rarely, like in everyday life, but are really important to know what to do when those things happen. And so, you know, we think back to the first thing we might think about when we think of virtual reality, or virtual simulations, is something like a flight simulator. I remember being a kid, and people were playing flight simulators on a computer. Now I can only imagine flight simulators are incredibly realistic in the sense that you can feel wind on you while you're in there, if you're, you know, in a plane that doesn't have a thing on it, if you want to, like simulate a WWI plane, you could almost feel like you're in one of those real planes, to like the more sophisticated ones where you'd see all the dials in the cockpit, right? I mean, you could just basically replicate anything you want. So I imagine that, that there's a lot of opportunity for this company to do all kinds of applications of VR and training. And that's one arm of their company. And then the other arm is now this education, but they started out in entertainment. So they shifted from making movies to making VR experiences where you are inside a movie. And their first thing was to build these stores in shopping malls, where you could go in, and you could pay about $20 to go into a VR experience where you're the hero or star in something that's much like a movie. So they have an Indiana Jones based one where you're an explorer, and you go through an ancient temple and you're trying to find this treasure. They have other ones where you go underwater, and you swim with things and save a whale. And they're, they're incredible. They're all really incredible and mind boggling. And there's so much to look at and you could do them 50 times because I have and see something different every single time depending on where you're looking when and so now they have these three areas. This company focuses on the training, the entertainment and then now education. So what I'm part of is the education part, but I still work with the same team of people that do all these, you know, that the same group of creative executives work in all these areas.

Amanda Niehaus  25:00  
Which is great to have that kind of cross pollination of ideas from ...

Michael Angilletta  25:04  
Yeah. Well, they have different challenges that they need to tackle in different cases. And they can spill over. So one example is, if you need to have somebody in VR, but they need to move and they are in a space that's confined, how do you get them to cross the street, or go to another area? If it's a training, and they've worked out where you get this point, press a button and you teleport there, right? And now you can move from that place. That enables us to take that approach or strategy and bring it into education and say, how can we explore a rainforest, if you want to take a field trip to the Amazon? Well, we can't go on a hike, but we can walk a few steps. And then we could teleport to another place and then walk a few steps, right? So we feel like we're actually walking through a course. But really, we're traversing in leaps.

Amanda Niehaus  25:48  
And so what are the what are the kinds of VR experiences that you're currently working on? Do you have sort of lab based ones and field trip based ones?

Michael Angilletta  25:57  
Well, it's a really good question. And it's an interesting challenge to say, if you are given - and you have taught before, so you probably can think through this challenge - if you were given the opportunity to build a course that uses virtual reality, what would you do? I think a lot of people would have the - and maybe even myself, when I first did this - would have the temptation to replicate the kind of thing that we do in a class. But when you stop and think about it, even the things that we do in the classroom have a historical bias to them, we do them because it's what people did before us. And we do them because it's what we can do. Now free yourself up and say, What if I could do anything? What would I do? So what I've embraced is this idea that I want to think the way I think today about being a biologist - because that's what I teach, I teach biology. And so I think back to how I learned and what I learned. And it turns out that almost all of it, certainly most of it wasn't really all that useful on a day to day basis when I became a biologist, and much of what I do, and the tools that I use, I acquired afterwards in graduate school or through experience. And so what I asked myself is, what would I want as an education, if I could go back and teach myself the way I appreciate with this lens that I'm looking at now - what's useful? And we're really focusing in on what we call transferable skills. Because I think on a daily basis, what I use mostly are a small toolbox of skills like quantitative reasoning skills, scientific communication skills, teamwork skills - I have to work with lots of different people that have lots of different experience, knit all that together. And even this area that we rarely talk about called metacognition, which means like, sort of knowing how we know stuff, and what we do know what we don't know and why we know it, why we don't know it, and how we can figure out the things we don't know, right, like, the knowing the knowns and the unknown knowns, the famous quote. But but the idea is metacognition is a is a trick that, I would say a skill that students often don't have, like, they don't appreciate what they know and what they don't know and how they can figure out what they don't know. So we broke all these skills down. And we tried to embed them through a course, where students instead of just replicating the kinds of experiments in VR that have been done in in, in classrooms, let's create realistic but novel problems for students to solve, where they engage in these problems in stories. And they discover problems as explorers in stories. 

So there's a narrative where they are a character, they are, in fact themselves as a person, but they're in a situation that they could never be in as themselves. So I'll give you an example, the whole course that we're building in General Biology, which is a freshman biology class - and you can imagine this course could be get delivered to somebody who's a biology major like I was or you were, or this course can be offered to somebody who's just taking a biology class to satisfy a general education requirement. And so it might be a slightly different flavor of biology for that particular person, that might never take a science class again. In both courses, we could use VR to enable students to become a biologist, and go anywhere and see anything and do anything. So here's what we came up with. And it's based on a theme that they already had for their education - for their entertainment division. They had this experience called the Alien Zoo. And in the Alien Zoo you visit in their entertainment experience, you visit this Alien Zoo, where you're beamed up to a ship. And this this space station is controlled by artificial intelligence. And imagine there was a civilization on a planet in a distant galaxy at some point where life created - life like us that's smart and know how to do stuff and has technology - created Artificial Intelligence. But then at some point, that life went extinct. And what was left behind was the Artificial Intelligence and the Artificial Intelligence, then decided that it was very unfortunate that its creators passed away so what they would do in honor of them was go out through the galaxy and try to preserve life that it figures is going to go extinct in the near future. And would bring it onto a space station and create a wildlife sanctuary. So an Intergalactic Wildlife Sanctuary. 

So this concept we thought was perfect for a biology course - what if you were a college intern through Arizona State University, you could become the first college interns to work in the Intergalactic Wildlife Sanctuary, right, and you get teleported up to this, and you work with the Artificial Intelligence, like students come to my lab and work with me as a mentor. So what better experience would be to go out into this completely alien world that you've never seen before, it's totally novel, everything's new and interesting and exciting, and you discover things. But you discover things in a guided way in the sense that, you know, there are problems that the Artificial Intelligence or the AI points out that we need to solve, like, there might be populations of organisms - and they're all endangered, because that's why they're there - and there might be disease that you have to cure, or there might be genetic diversity that you have to preserve. Or there might be movement among the different worlds that you created - the artificial worlds - that you have to keep invasive species from spreading. There's all kinds of endless problems. And they all mirror problems that we have on Earth, in a sense that they're realistic problems for a wildlife sanctuary or for an actual environment on Earth. But the advantage of this Intergalactic Wildlife Sanctuary is because we create all of these creatures from scratch. We try to make them follow chemical, physical, and biological principles, but we do them from scratch in the sense that they're not real creatures. And we use data from Earth to kind of base them but it's, it's massaged or manipulated in a way so that you could never know where these data came from. If I'm a student, I could never Google the answers, right? So if you give me a class on biology, and you give me an assignment that researches tigers, I just do a Google search and I can find pretty much everything I need to know about tigers. If that assignment had ever been done before, I'm going to find all the answers online. If you give me that same assignment about some creature from another planet that's completely fictitious, there's no way, right, I have to do the work then. I have to figure out like a scientist would figure out what's going on and what the problem is, and how do I solve the problem? I have to generate my own hypotheses, I have to figure out what data I need to collect and I have to then analyze the data. And so all this is designed to try to get students to think like scientists from the very first day they enter rather than to have them sit back in a class, and listen to me talk about what scientists actually do.

Amanda Niehaus  32:28  
Can I Oh, that sounds so amazing. Like I just, yeah, very cool. And in the creation of these, these organisms, do you? So you said you try to keep it to principles, but do you have kind of like a, a cheat sheet of the the physiology and the ecology of each of these organisms? Or is that part of what students help develop over time?

Michael Angilletta  32:56  
Well, it's kind of a back and forth. So we start out - the very first idea about a world would be to meet with a creature artist, and these creature artists work for Hollywood movies. You know, we can all criticize creatures in Hollywood movies, often I come out of movies, I criticize them myself, right? Like, that just didn't make or that didn't make any sense. We start with the creature artist's ideas, this particular creature artists, Brynn Metheney, is really interested in the natural world. So she draws a lot of her inspiration from organisms on Earth that are odd looking, but they really exist, right. And so most people may be unaware of them. Maybe they're microscopic, maybe they're, you know, live in obscure environments. And so for whatever reason, we don't know about them, but they exist. And she'll try to draw inspiration from that, and adapt those to these alien worlds. But then what we'll do as biologists will look at these creatures and try to make comments about it. And it's a tug of war, or a give and take. And so to some extent, there are decisions that are made because it's a little bit more alluring for a student for a creature to look like this or behave like that. And that's one concern that like the people that do things at Dreamscape will voice as we develop these, and then on the other end, there's the biology - so well, that thing can't fly, there's no way that would work, right? So like, it can't have that body shape if it's going to fly. Or, you know, it can't be a creature that lives in water, if it's if it's built like this. And so we do the best that we can. And, of course, you have to fudge. So of course, you have to suspend disbelief at some point, because you can't get everything right. So what I would say is, the rules that we use are, we try not to fudge on the things that matter to a particular topic. So if I'm teaching physiology, I have to be really clear about the physiology of the organism that we're dealing with. I could be a little bit off or ask you to sort of suspend disbelief about something else, but I don't want to do that with the physiology. If I'm teaching genetics, same thing, I want to be really clear that the genetics makes sense. You know, I'm going to either not be specific about the physiology in that case, I might not even tell you if it has one heart or two hearts or any hearts, right. And in fact, we have an organism with two hearts, one for that serves the brain and one that serves the rest of the body. So like we think about weird physiology and stuff. But I might not even mention that physiology in a section where I'm teaching a topic like genetics, because it's best not to leave it, you know, it's best to talk about it, because the minute you talk about it, now it's on the table, and people think about it. So we want to do is, we want them to think about the thing that they're learning at that moment, and we want to create that to be as realistic and sensical as it would be for an organism that evolved on some other planet. And so that's, that's, so that's the tug of war. And then there's also like, let's cover up things right, that we don't need to talk about, so that you don't commit, because we don't know down the line, we might want to do an advanced course something about the physiology of a creature that we've never even explored the physiology before. So we could at that point, come back and ask other people in that course, to think about what the physiology of that creature might look like. Or, even better, we could ask students who have learned about the physiology of creatures on Earth, to imagine what the physiology of that creature looks like. And that's an assignment - design the physiological system of that, like design the cardiovascular system, or design the kidney, of this particular creature, given what you know about things on Earth. So by keeping it vague, sometimes we gain advantages, in the sense that we don't introduce any bias unnecessarily, but we also leave opportunities in the future for students to be creative and think.

Amanda Niehaus  36:22  
And this, this aspect of the design process, I think, really connects well with writers of maybe Speculative Fiction or Science Fiction, who are inventing creatures and ecologies on, you know, in different worlds or in our worlds. You know, just that the whole idea of of, you know, where the where the inspiration comes from, for the for the organisms and, and what sorts of details you develop in the story, like to maintain the connection with the story without distracting the reader or the person experiencing too much.

Michael Angilletta  37:04  
Yeah, how much is too TMI? Right about ...

Amanda Niehaus  37:07  
Yeah, exactly. 

Michael Angilletta  37:08  
... the character or the scene or whatever. That's why I would make a terrible writer, I gotta tell you, because like, I think like a scientist, and I write like a scientist. And when I read books that are written by people who are creative, like creative fiction, it's totally different, right, than how I was trained to write. And so I would really struggle with that balance. I mean, you probably have a really good sense of it because you write a lot. And you write a lot of creative fiction, as well as science. But I have a challenge.

Amanda Niehaus  37:35  
I have a question for you about this. Mike. Do you feel like this experience has made you more able to accept sort of people transforming into birds in fiction, hypothetically?

Michael Angilletta  37:46  
Oh, is your idea [laughs] that's a reference to one of your famous short stories that you've tested on me? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think metaphorical writing has a place. It's just some people like myself, are so logically programmed, that they don't respond to metaphorical things, though. And, and so often I do, even with movies, like certain movies that I watch, and I think, well, I know that was supposed to be about something that wasn't literal. But I was looking for literal, you know what I mean? Like, I was looking for the literal, but that didn't really didn't do it for me.

Amanda Niehaus  38:22  
So is there is there space for metaphor in these courses that you're developing?

Michael Angilletta  38:28  
Um, I think, Well, okay. So part of it is now we get down to the nitty gritty. And I would say that, ultimately, I trust the storytelling instincts of Walter Parks and his team of people who are trained in that. And I try to learn from them the rules that they believe make a good story, because I mean, who am I to question 50 blockbuster films, right over the course of a career? I'm sure he's doing something right. [Laugh] You know, so just like, I would hope he would trust the fact that I've published 100 scientific papers that if it comes down to like, what kind of data should we see here? Or what kind of biological testing you do? He would trust me. And so what, I'll tell you some of the things I've learned, that resonate with me well, and this relates back to what we just talked about before, like when you make a creature, like, there might be some temptation and if it's alien creature to make everything novel and everything strange, but one of the first things he said to us was, look - you have to give people a comfortable chair, and the more alien the world, the more comfortable the chair they need to be in that world. And what I've interpreted that to mean in practice is when we think about building these for education, these experiences, the less we have to change to make them novel, the more we can make them, you know, almost like things on earth. So maybe this is an alien world and these things evolved completely independently of things on Earth, but maybe we can lean into the idea that in similar types of worlds on in the galaxy, similar types of chemicals exist and therefore similar processes might happen over and over again, in different places. This is the idea called convergent evolution that like if you have life that evolved on one planet and another planet, but the circumstances, the raw materials are similar, you might get similar designs. And this isn't far fetched, because you look at life in Australia, where you live and life in North America, and life in South America, these continents at one point were quite isolated. And you see instances of this convergent evolution where similar designs have evolved. Now, of course, the caveat here is these designs have evolved from a common starting point of life on Earth. But but if you if you want to get less technical about it, like, if you want to be like, really technical, and say it would all be different, anyway, another planet, I think less technical is better. Because I say, what's important for students trying to learn - we want to give them enough novelty for them to be excited by these creatures, but enough comfortable chair, enough similarity, for them to be able to relate to them. So, you know, it's why Disney takes away some limbs on an insect, it makes it look like a four-armed person, but it's an insect, because, you know, an eight armed or six arm insect will freak somebody out when it's talking and walking around on screen, you want to give them something they can relate to. And when it blinks its eyes, you know, it looks like something they get emotional over. So one of the things we learned is that like, the most important thing about this is to make an emotional connection to the student. As the student experiences these things, we want to draw them into the story, so that they care about these organisms. And so we don't want the organism to be so foreign-looking so alien-looking that they can't relate to them through empathy. And so that's the idea of how I interpret the comfortable chair, I change enough about a creature so that it doesn't look like it's from Earth. But it's similar enough, maybe in maybe its cells work in a similar way. Maybe its organs look similar, even though there's some slight differences. Maybe it has eyes like we have even though the eyes evolved independently. Whatever it is, you have to give them enough to care about the creature. If they can't recognize it, because it's so strange, then how do you care about it?

Amanda Niehaus  42:03  
Yeah, I can see that that comfortable chair in a lot of movies, or books being the the character, the main, the main character, the hero, and, and that you need to set up that connection with that person. Who they are, even if they're in a completely different universe, or a different world or a different experience from you. There's - you try to build those points of connection straight up with the reader.

Michael Angilletta  42:04  
Yeah, in this case, it's weird, though, isn't it because you are supposed to be the hero on these? 

Amanda Niehaus  42:37  
Yes.

Michael Angilletta  42:37  
Right, so you are, I think about it like in this class, we're building an Intergalactic Wildlife Sanctuary. The other person is not a person. It's an Artificial Intelligence. And, you know, one could argue ... there's a lot of freedom here. And it turns out the direction they went, they have a voice actor who does it. Who does an Attenborough voice. So from the nature classics - anyone's grown up watching a nature documentary will recognize Attenborough's voice and the voice actor does the voice really well, people actually think it's that person. But you know, that voice comes across with a certain personality, I think. And you could argue that it's a serious voice. And maybe it doesn't joke around much. But of course, another way of saying it is like, how would artificial intelligence talk if like maybe learned English from watching TV? And so maybe it talks like we do, right? Maybe it makes grammatical mistakes, and maybe it has slang it uses. And all those are really interesting choices that you make when you develop a character. And you decide I think the choices that are made, we don't really think too much about it until after the fact then we understand how students perceive it. Like through the students' eyes, we learn - how do you perceive this Artificial Intelligence? Is this how you expect it, it would be? Or would you expect it to be more like what I just said, less serious, goofy? Like, why couldn't it be a voice like Robin Williams, right? Why could it be telling jokes because it learned jokes watching American TV or Australian TV or so that - why would it even speak English? These are all really interesting questions when you create these characters. Now, I would say that, in a sense, this is where, arguably, I failed as a storyteller, but where the experience of building this taught me that if I were to do this, again, I would ask all these questions up front, and maybe have these conversations before we just dove right in and made these decisions. So we don't always think about, when we did this course we didn't think about - what are the ramifications of these decisions that we use Attenborough's voice? Well, we just decided English is the language that the Artificial Intelligence from another galaxy learned. We decided it was British English, and we decided that it was gonna talk this way. [Laughs] Right? So it's really interesting as a writer, I imagine you have some perspective - how do you how do you make these decisions when you choose a character and say - this how the character talks, this is the slang that character uses, this the accent. How do you do it? I don't know.

Amanda Niehaus  44:52  
No, definitely. I think it's it's a lot like building those those animals that you were talking about that you you think carefully about what you want, what the readers experience, what you want the readers experience to be or like, where you want to take the reader, what details you want them to focus on. And any kind of build these, you build the character as a as a sort of container to sort of not only hold some of these details, but but also carry the reader through the experience. So I could see how it would be very different experience if you had a if you have a guide in in one of these experiences versus if the person is in there on their own. And I almost feel like fiction, like like books are even though even? No, it's an interesting question, actually. So if you if you find yourself in an avatar in virtual reality, what is what is the difference between that and immersing yourself in a character in a book, in terms of how your brain works, or what your experience is of the world?

Michael Angilletta  46:09  
Yeah, when you read a book, I guess we'll start with this. When you read a book, do you picture yourself doing the things that the character's doing? Or do you picture the character doing those things? I mean, I never asked anybody this question. So I don't even know what other people think.

Amanda Niehaus  46:22  
Yeah, no, and I'm a I'm a really special case for this. I can't answer it entirely, because I'm one of those people who can't visualize things. I think they call it aphantasia. So I can't close my eyes and picture myself walking up the stairs or picture myself winning an award like [...]

Michael Angilletta  46:45  
[...] translate to you can't fantasize - aphantasia? Is that?

Amanda Niehaus  46:49  
Yeah, must be Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's like some small percentage of people can't do this. And I always thought, and like so many so many people who have this, I always thought when it when you said, you know, visualize yourself winning the award or like picture a flower in your, in your mind, I always thought that was metaphorical. I was [laughs] I didn't realize that 

Michael Angilletta  47:13  
... People were actually doing ...

Amanda Niehaus  47:14  
Yeah, I didn't realize that people could actually do that. So I'm [...]

Michael Angilletta  47:17  
That's interesting, you have another frame of reference that [...] even know what that meant.

Amanda Niehaus  47:21  
Yeah. And actually, it makes me wonder if people like me would experience virtual reality in a different way. Because we, we see, like, when I read, I feel things rather than see them. So it's like, it's like, I experience the story of the book out of the corner of my eye. Like, it's, it's an experience, but if I look at it, it disappears.

Michael Angilletta  47:47  
Oh, that's really weird. For me that's totally different. I picture - not every detail like a movie, but I kind of picture something happening while I'm reading. It's definitely not me, though. It's someone else. Whereas when you're in VR, it's very much a first person perspective. And at least from my experience, I feel immersed. And I very quickly forget, if it's high quality VR, I very quickly forget that it's not me. And what makes this Dreamscape technology different than VR I've tried before, is that they have if you if you come to the university, you can try this, when you come out. The students that are on campus will go to a VR pod where it's a very large area. And they have hand trackers and foot trackers and a head tracker. And what the computer does is render a model of your body in real dimensions based on that information from the hand trackers, foot tracker, the head trackers, and then maps everything in between and sort of guesstimates what you're doing. And so you could wave, we could high five, we could walk around and touch objects that while they seem like they're in VR, this is set up so that when you touch them in the real world, there's something physically there, you know, or things will spray on you or you'll feel wind. And with all these tricks, the floors will rumble, your brain completely gets fooled, because it has this like what Disney might call 4D, right? You have this fourth dimension of feeling in addition to all the things that you see in three dimensions, and you very quickly, I think, buy into the fact that you're in a strange world. And it's really weird, because after a while I'm in there with somebody I actually forget it's somebody else. It's not the avatar. You know what I mean? Because I've seen the avatar for like a half an hour now. And I'm thinking oh, I'm with this person who's the avatar, and I forget who I'm really with in there. I would be curious to see how your brain perceives that just like you said, because it might be different.

Amanda Niehaus  49:37  
Yeah, yeah, cuz I see. I don't know I feel like maybe Virtual Reality fills, fills in a space that words cultivate in books. So in you know, in a book you you have to write in a way that that immerses the person in the place or in the feeling, you know, using using words that evoke the senses. And here you're actually physically feeling those things. So in that sense, there's maybe less of a gap for your brain to fill in. Is that, do you? Do you think that that's accurate? Do you think that that affects sort of imagination? Is VR more about wonder than imagination, do you think?

Michael Angilletta  50:27  
I absolutely think you're onto something there. So that is a much closer adjective to my feeling when I'm in VR than imagination. Because as you point out, what I'm seeing has been rendered, you know, by someone else for me. What I'm feeling - same. And so I'm really excited when I'm in VR. I'm amazed when I'm in VR, I, I find wonder when I'm in VR, and I'm seeing something I hadn't noticed before, like I would, I went in this underwater thing, where, like I told you about, you go under water, and there's a whole mystery and you save a whale. I had done that 20 times, probably, with guests that I bring in to show them. And this one time I realized - there's a Moray eel coiled up on this thing that I'm grabbing, and it had been there the whole time. It had been there every single time I did it. But I never noticed. And I like, whoa, that's so cool. Like, look, I've been in this for the first time, right. And that was what I would call wonder or amazement, or whatever. It's not what I would call imagination or creativity. And I wonder if it's gonna take a while for VR to get to the point where we can use other adjectives. Like it has to be really realistic. So that you completely forget where you are, and start to imagine what you don't see, right? Because imagination happens when I'm sitting here talking to you, I can imagine something, I'm imagining it because I'm not seeing it. Right, and I'm not hearing it, and I'm not feeling it. So I think the VR that would cause you to imagine things would have to be very different VR than the VR designed to cause you to wonder, or be amazed.

Amanda Niehaus  52:05  
But also, I mean, maybe part of it, too, is about noticing - which is something that kind of draws to the idea of Natural History. And and just becoming so familiar with a particular place, over changes of seasons, maybe, or through time. And and noticing those small changes, or noticing things that you didn't see before, because you are in a sense of familiar. So there might even be a kind of another sort of benefit or advantage to experiencing the same virtual reality again, and again, like you did, because you suddenly notice something that you hadn't seen before. And you got that sense of delight from from that noticing in the same way that you might, sitting out in your backyard and looking at, you know, your cactus garden. And noticing how something small ...

Michael Angilletta  53:02  
... flowers today, right?

Amanda Niehaus  53:02  
... has changed. Yes, yeah, yeah, exactly. And so there may even be a different kind of use for these technologies, other than just going in once and having your experience and leaving, right.

Michael Angilletta  53:15  
Yeah, if you think about it from an education perspective, like we've, we've chosen to use VR in a very specific way. And when I first started on this, I had to decide, and it's, it's really crazy to think how much freedom was given to me, not an expert in VR, right? Not Not even for those of you who don't know, as professors, we aren't even experts in education, like we have absolutely zero education in how to teach. We have all this training in how to do research, but not how to actually communicate that and to deliver information, the way that students learn and help students learn. We figure that out on the fly, right? We figure that out as we go. And most of us never really figure it out. So now all of a sudden, I've been given an opportunity to develop this product at scale, of thousands of students, which is costing a ton of money. And it's very exciting, but like, what do I know about this? Right? So I had to really think about how we're gonna do this and why. And I thought about two ways that VR can be used and has been used. And one way is to train people to do tasks that are repetitive and require practice. And so if you could go in and practice them, virtually, you could eventually get good, right? So think about the the flight simulator. That's a great example that I brought up before, pilots have to know what to do in a certain situation, they may not ever face it more than once in their career, but if they don't know how to do it, they're gonna crash the plane. So how do you do this? You get them to practice responding to situations when they get right. And that's a great way to simulate things. But that is not what we try to do here in VR. Instead, I went for a different direction. Because - and there's a good reason for it because most of what we do in biology, we already do virtually anyway, so much of what a day-to-day biologist does is sits at a computer and analyzes data. And while we - you and I - love to go in the field, very little time is spent in the field relative to designing an experiment, analyzing data or being in the lab doing something repetitive. And that's not something you want to do in VR. So there's a rule about VR. Nobody wants to go into VR and do something they don't want to do in real life, right? [Laughs] You want to go in VR and do something that you actually enjoy doing in the real world. But you don't get the chance to do it, because you can't go there, or you don't have the money or whatever, right. And so nobody would design going into VR and using Microsoft Excel, to calculate the average or a standard deviation of some data you collected, right? [Laughs] That would be horrible. But those are the skills that students need. Like if they're going to be scientist, they need that those quantitative skills, and they need to do that stuff that scientists do. So we design VR to excite them about doing those things. So why am I sitting in front of my computer, analyzing these data - I'm doing it because I went to this Intergalactic Wildlife Sanctuary. And these crazy cool creatures that I saw that I would never experience anywhere in my life, all around me, have a problem. And I got to know them and see them and maybe touch them and care about them. And now I want to help them. And so when I go to class, and I sit in front of my computer, like regular scientists have to do to learn stuff, I have a reason. I know why I'm doing it. I'm not just doing it because my teacher said - This is what you've got to do if you want to be a scientist, you need to learn this. I'm doing it because I want to solve the problem. And me and my friends who went in this VR together, decided that if we analyze the data this way, we can come up with the answer. And so I I leaned into the second use of VR, which I call engagement, like what I think of as engaging people in VR. I'm not trying to teach at all, when we design something in VR, it's not to teach students something - it's to give them an experience that emotionally connects them so that when they come out of VR, then they can learn and they have a reason, a reason or a need to know something. And so that the hand in hand happens is that the the people at Dreamscape who know how to tell stories, they help us engage, to make that emotional connection. The people who work at ASU that I work with to design the lesson materials, they know what students need to learn, and they know how to put those two things together so that when you go in and out of VR -  you go into VR, you discover a problem, oh, my God, we got to get out and solve that You go into the classroom, and you work with all these well developed tools for learning. And you learn the stuff you need to know to solve the problem, then you go back into VR, and you try a solution, or you get some more data that might help you figure out if you are on the right track, then you come out of VR and back into the classroom. And as you keep going back and forth, the story progresses. And so the way we're using VR is it's not like going in once and you're done, you keep going in and you're part of the story the whole semester, like you're in the same situation with the same artificial intelligence, and you're solving lots of different problems in this space station, with lots of different worlds to explore. But you're going in and out. And what what you end up doing, hopefully, is that you learn a lot of skills and understand a lot of biological concepts without thinking about it as sitting in a classroom. But thinking about it as being part of this story.

Amanda Niehaus  58:07  
And are there ways to design the problems, to test scientific ideas that are like, difficult to actually test in real life? Like, can you use your virtual reality world in some senses as a model to sort of test, run experiments that that might be too challenging in the real world? Or to ask questions about organisms in in different ways that extend scientific knowledge at the same time?

Michael Angilletta  58:39  
Well, so you're, I think you're hinting at or getting at the idea of simulating, right. Simulating things. So like scientists often, there are lots of experiments we can't do. Like, for example, we can't study the Earth, because there's only one Earth so we can't replicate it and do an experiment, take one Earth and do something on it, and then take the other and do something else on it [Laughs] and then compare, much less have 10 Earths in one treatment and 10 Earths in another treatment. So we would simulate things, right? We run simulations on computers, and we say, well, what if these things were true? And then what would happen and we simulate it. In a sense, a VR experience is a simulation. But it's a simulation that's immersive. And so the answer, I think, is of course, yes, we can. The degree to which people find that interesting to simulate in in an immersive environment versus simulating on your desktop computer, then sure. And so when I simulate a desktop computer, or when you simulated a desktop computer, the answers that we get are like graphs or numbers. When you're in immersion, maybe that's a better way to simulate. And this is what some scientists at ASU are starting to explore, particularly people that study patterns, geographic patterns, landscape patterns, like there are people that are involved in Mars expeditions to try to collect data about Mars and try to recreate what it looks like on Mars and what the topology, the geology of Mars is like, and you know, whenever you think about space, whether you like space or not, I think it's really fascinating to ask - would I simulate on my computer what it's like to be on Mars, or would I want to walk on Mars, right? So would I take the same data and use it to recreate Mars, and now I go around, and I observe patterns that I would normally see as a graph on my computer. Those two ways of thinking about it could be really complimentary. And I think these scientists are arguing that that the latter way, this new way of using VR might be an interesting thing to explore. Maybe it doesn't replace simulations on your desktop computer. But maybe it helps us think about those simulations more intuitively, or instinctively.

Amanda Niehaus  1:00:41  
Imagine how much more fun conferences would be. [Laughs]

Michael Angilletta  1:00:44  
Oh, yeah, yeah. That's right. So now, in the last few years, we all realize that we could be virtually anywhere through zoom. But now imagine you had an avatar, you chose your avatar, and I would be tall and have lots of hair. [Laughs] And I will go to the conference and give my talk, you know, through my avatar, and then we'd all go hang out. But unfortunately, that takes away all the fun of going out for beers after. I'd be sitting in my room by myself. [Laughs] Really if you think about it, it's quite sad, actually. But But yeah, but I think that's another potential use of VR, right is to allow people to socialize from a distance. So one thing this company also does, which has application for education is they have something called a virtual classroom, where you could be in Australia, where you are now, and I could be here in Phoenix, Arizona, in the US, and we could each put on the same VR equipment. And through a computer connection, we could be in the same room together, sitting next to each other at a table. And we could point to each other, we could talk, you'd see my lips moving, you hear me, but you're completely across the world. And you could bring people from all over the world together to do something in a virtual environment. And now, you know, there's lots of uses for that - business meetings, right, where you want to actually read body language and stuff like that. But also, you could use it for education. So I could take students from different classrooms, and they could all go with an expert. Let's say you want to go to an archeological dig with an expert in archaeology, archaeology somewhere across the world. And we're all going from different classrooms. Let's say you want to go to an art museum with an art historian. And we're all coming from different places around the world, we're all going to the Louvre, right? In France. So there's a lot of uses, I think, for VR in education, and once we start to think about like, what could we do? Once we get creative and think, well, what could we do with it? And then we try. What we really don't know, I think now is how effective are these things going to be relative to the normal ways of learning. And we can imagine that they're going to be more engaging, and thus, they might inspire us to spend more time and effort learning, and they might encourage us to ask questions we didn't ask before, but I think now we're just starting to get to the point where we can study this objectively, in experiments and really figure out is it going to be better for students? Because, you know, on one hand, there's a cost too, so there's an investment required to do this. And the question is, does the cost outweigh the benefits?

Yeah, that's, that's a really important question. Um, Mike, one thing I definitely wanted to talk to you before we run out of time, is your experience coming from the science background, now working with this massive interdisciplinary creative team? Because you you guys work with artists, and storytellers and musicians to sort of think about how you put these experiences together. And can you can you speak to sort of your, your experience with the different roles and the different interactions that happen?

Yeah, I think if, if I've been successful in doing it, it's because I've managed to be very plastic, or very flexible, right? Because I've seen people on this project from the beginning, who are not still on the project. And I think like, so why am I still on the project, and others are not - I ask myself, right? [Laughs] Like how did I not get thrown off this project yet. And I think it's that what you just said, there's so many different people, there's more than 100 people involved in this, across the university, and also with the other company that we work with. And so everyone comes with a different perspective and a different expertise. But yet it all has to come together. And so you have to be really flexible or plastic, if you like, behaviorally - you have to figure out how people work and how to read the room. And it's hard because it's all zoom. So you have to figure out how not to offend people on Zoom, how to listen on Zoom, how to know when to speak and when not to speak on Zoom. And you know, I'm not great at that. [Laughs] Knowing me for as long as you have. And so I think if anything I've learned, I've learned to ask myself the questions that I read it, like does this need to be said, does this need to be said by me, does need to be said by me now? And those are the three questions I read about in one of these articles on my Apple news feed, right? And about how to be emotionally intelligent. And that has helped me a lot of times, right, because I used to get into trouble in some of these meetings before, less so now when I started doing that, but the part of it is just is understanding the ability to figure out how to work with many different people and to hear their side and to try different things. And also, the most important thing of being plastic flexible is not getting attached to any one idea. So most of my ideas that I would have had been batted down, or even if they were accepted later, they were changed, right? You just got to get used to the idea that nothing is sacred, and nothing is ever done. And nothing is set in stone. And things will change. And that's okay. Because as long as it gets better, that's the whole process. That I think has been the biggest lesson - is learning how to let the ego go.

Amanda Niehaus  1:05:55  
Yeah, no. And I think that's, that's important. Because in collaborative work, it's, you have to release that sense of, you know, that my idea of seeing your idea as a sort of thread all the way to the end product. It's it's more that the threads are broken and woven in different ways. And so you've contributed to the end product. 

Michael Angilletta  1:06:17  
Yeah. 

Amanda Niehaus  1:06:17  
But you don't have to see your specific idea there to make it [...]

Michael Angilletta  1:06:21  
Yeah. In an ideal world, Amanda, like along the lines of what you're saying - If my idea, led someone else to have a different idea, which then led someone else to have another idea, which then came back and gave me a fourth idea, and the final idea is just great, and nobody would have come up with it on their own. You know what I mean, but it's not anyone's idea. It's everyone's idea. That's really what happens in these meetings after, after a while you can't remember who did it. Everyone feels like they contributed.

Amanda Niehaus  1:06:55  
Which is exactly where you want to be, I think.

Michael Angilletta  1:07:00  
Sure. Makes me feel good.

Amanda Niehaus  1:07:02  
Mike, I think that's a great place for us to to finish up today. On that sort of high positive, collaborative note. [Laugh] Thank you so much for for chatting with me. 

Michael Angilletta  1:07:15  
You're welcome. 

Amanda Niehaus  1:07:16  
Thanks, Mike. 

Michael Angilletta  1:07:17  
Thanks for having me.