SUNY JCC Holds Ribbon Cutting for New Augmented, Virtual Reality Room

SUNY Jamestown Community College officially opened a virtual and augmented reality room in the Sheldon Center on the Jamestown Campus this week. 

Laura Parmenter, director of Online Learning at JCC, began the event by welcoming Jessica Kubiak, interim vice president of Academic Affairs, who shared that the room was made possible through an Innovative Instruction Technology Grant from the State University of New York.
 
“The funds encourage students, faculty, and staff to extend beyond departmental and campus boundaries to pilot, share and scale up innovations that transform teaching and learning practices,” Kubiak said.
 
According to Kubiak, the college created the room with three goals in mind: encourage interactive learning engagement, increase student recruitment and enrollment in STEM fields, and expand the use of the room beyond the needs of the Computer Science department to other academic programs.

“In the coming year, JCC will celebrate its 75th anniversary, and it’s really exciting for higher education to have this opportunity to play with the disciplinary boundaries of what we do and think about how what we’re imagining fits together,” Kubiak said. “I’m excited that initiatives like this will be part of the slate of learning opportunities we have to share with our students.”

Kubiak introduced Jonathan “Jamie” Blair, instructor of Computer Science at JCC, to provide more insight into the design of the room and its importance in preparing Computer Science students to be successful in an ever-evolving field.

“Computer Science is about imagination, creativity, and tinkering with things,” Blair said. “Let’s give students the ability to be creative and play and investigate things, because technology moves too fast for us to be able to teach them everything they need to know 10 years from now.”

Blair said the AR/VR room is the only one of its kind in the area that is publicly owned and available for educational use. In creating the space, he wanted more than to simply “get caught up” with technology.

Blair wanted to get ahead.

That meant creating a space where free movement was possible. As presenters spoke in a nearby classroom, the audience watched a streaming broadcast of Sam Gast, art student at JCC, as she created a virtual tree in the VR room.
 
“Our virtual reality room allows us to drop someone into a space, and they can interact with that entire space,” Blair explained. “This puts us ahead of other schools and community colleges in the area.”

Blair said larger universities are working with this technology, and he wanted to be able to provide as similar an experience as possible. Blair mentioned that while virtual reality is used in other professions, “no one is focusing on teaching Computer Science students how to write virtual reality software.”

Linking back to Kubiak’s statements, Blair explained that Computer Science students at JCC will work to build virtual reality systems that students in other fields of study will be able to utilize.

Daniel DeMarte, president of JCC, shared his recent experience with the room. “I got to walk the streets of Singapore last Friday,” he said. “It was an amazing, incredible experience. I felt like I was right there — the graphics were just unbelievable. I’ve never experienced anything like that.”

Blair explained the system is able to interface with Google Earth and allow the user to experience locations all over the world, and even outer space.

“We have an experience of an eclipse from space so when we start getting ready for the eclipse we will be able to show what it looks like from up there,” Blair said.

Among those in attendance were James Feldmann, executive assistant to County Executive PJ Wendel, County Legislator Phil Landy, Christine Rinaldi on behalf of Congressman Nick Langworthy, Lisa Vanstrom on behalf of Senator George Borello and Assemblyman Andy Goodell, Jamestown City Council members Brent Sheldon and William Reynolds, and Daniel Heitzenrater, president and CEO of the Chautauqua Chamber of Commerce and JCC Board of Trustees member.

Many of them offered their congratulations and words of encouragement to the college.

“There’s a lot to offer here and I’m grateful we have JCC at our fingertips for our young people, as well as people from further away that would like to experience this kind of educational opportunity,” Vanstrom said. “On behalf of Senator Borello, congratulations.” She also extended congratulations from Goodell and appreciation for “providing students with progressive educational opportunities.”
 
Rinaldi thanked the college on behalf of Congressman Langworthy “for the investment in education and then the community.”

Reynolds closed the ceremony by reiterating the importance of staying current with technology. “The experience we saw on the screen in our room lends us to believe what the potential can be for all kinds of disciplines, and it’s great timing to have this here in a leading-edge kind of way, and a frontrunner to have it in our hands right here at our local college.”

Anyone interested in this or any of the programs available at JCC is invited to attend the college’s upcoming Open House events. The dates and details are available at sunyjcc.edu/OpenHouse.