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Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Emerging Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.
How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?
I use established and emerging technologies to create resources and visualizations to aid in teaching and research for art history, archaeology, and related disciplines.
What’s your favorite emerging tech project you’ve worked on?
Drawing on original photographic fieldwork, I developed VR tours of cultural heritage sites which are controlled by instructors and served synchronously to headsets worn by students. In the past few years, we’ve been able to give hundreds of students their first VR experiences within an art history course.
What emerging tech are you most optimistic about? Least? And why?
Most optimistic: AR for culture/the humanities; AR is very actionable for revenue-focused companies and their R&D should trickle down to non-profit and consumer spaces quickly. While VR has great applications in the humanities and pedagogy, it can be stifling for discussions between groups of students. AR can open up those experiences into a more intuitive and collaborative space.
Least optimistic: 3D-printing for culture/the humanities; I find the costs and barriers to entry for 3D printing to still be quite high for people who aren’t already generally familiar with its capabilities. A few years back, it seemed like the tech could quickly become much more ubiquitous. However, I think there’s lots of room to integrate more tactile experiences at all levels of learning, so I hope I’ll be proven wrong in the coming years.
What’s the best piece of tech-related media you've read/watched/listened to?
There’s an old video of John Carmack at Oculus Connect 2 where he’s live coding on a headset. It’s dazzling to see someone who can move between hardware and software with such deep understanding.