A voyage into virtual reality. Networking our VR lab to Iowa middle schools and high schools

The Iowa Communications Network (ICN) is a statewide, state administered, fiber optics network. Iowa State University (ISU) is one of the fiber optics endpoints and one of the main entities using the ICN to reach the Iowa community. As part of the ICN outreach activities at ISU, we are investigating how the ICN can be integrated with our research projects in virtual reality (VR). We´re particularly interested in how the ICN can enable remote collaborations in immersive virtual environments with sites that don´t have any or have limited local resources for VR. We present our first project with the ICN to bring our VR lab to remote middle schools and high schools in Iowa. This project was done in collaboration with Iowa Public Television (IPTV), another ICN endpoint. We connected to 86 schools simultaneously and reached about 2000 students. Ten sites were in interactive two-way video and audio mode. The rest were in viewing-only video and audio mode. We discuss the motivation, technical details, results, and future directions