Week 11 – 11/12/14: “Controlling the Controllers” & Jas Purewal (& Oculus Rifts)

There are many thank you’s due after this past weeks class which involved an unprecedented amount of technology.

First thanks to Jas Purewal for joining us from London England to talk about international video game law issues. Jas’ perspectives on video game law are regularly  at his popular site at http://www.gamerlaw.co.uk

Huge thanks also to Jesse Joudrey and Graham Gaylor of  vrchat.net, a VR platform people can build their own social VR experiences onto, for all the work they did to set up the Oculus experience and for obtaining seven Rift headsets for the use of the class. Thanks also to Associate Dean Benjamin Goold and Maria Erhardt of the Faculty Law for their help in making this happen.

Student reactions to the experience as well as mine from a pedagogic perspective can be found at the post below titled “Project Oculus: Our Virtual reality Classroom”. To link to that post and comments directly go to http://videogame.law.ubc.ca/2014/11/12/oculus-alternate-classroom-is-114/

That this technical tour-de-force all ran as smoothly as it did is thanks to  Dan Silverman of the Faculty of Law. Dan has provided incredible support for the course and all its experimentation from the inception of the 2.0 version three academic seasons ago. Am so very thankful for all Dan does on a regular basis for the course. He has truly become integral to its design and execution.

Video and slides below (including a YouTube video of the class as you might have seen it with a Rift, minus 3D immersion of course).

jon