Tony Crider hopes one day the virtual environments he has worked on and played with his entire adult life will touch lives outside of the computer screen.
Specifically, Crider wants them to help his grandmother see his home for the first time.
“My grandmother is probably never going to leave her house for the rest of her life, except for hospitals or restaurants close by,” Crider said. “She will never be able to see my house physically, but maybe she will be able to see it virtually. If she could wear a device like the Oculus Rift that would allow her to see my house, I could give her a tour of the place. That would be a great future.”
Crider, associate professor of physics at Elon University since 2006, has always had a high opinion of virtual environments and their applications in the real world. He edited levels of the video game Duke Nukem 3D in graduate school just for fun. He’s taught courses where students build museum exhibits online for people to explore. He’s done demonstrations of the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset, on campus, which allowed students to explore Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment and Elon’s Carlton building.
But it took Crider time to realize it was even a possibility that the virtual world could transport his grandmother into his own home. He spent his college days tweaking primitive software on early computers, when technology like the Oculus Rift and programs like Second Life were a pipe dream.
New technology was the launching point for his lifelong passion.
‘I just did it for the hell of it’
Crider juggled three jobs in the early 1990s while working toward a bachelor’s degree in science at Bowling Green State University. Two of those jobs were a gig at the computer lab and working as a janitor at the health center on weekends. The third job was the most indicative of his future — he led stargazing sessions at the campus planetarium.
Explaining stars to the public was the beginning of Crider’s career in space studies, and making astronomy work in the virtual world came soon after. According to Dale Smith, a professor of physics and astronomy at Bowling Green, Crider went to planetarium conferences and made presentations notably early in his college career.
“One of the papers he presented was called ‘Ptolemy with Ptrue Basic,’” Smith said. “Of course we spelled his name ‘Ptony’ because of it. It explained a computer program he wrote to demonstrate the Ptolemaic model of the solar system used by the Greeks. You could see this as the start of the virtual reality work he does today.”
Crider’s interests in space and the virtual world came even closer together when he took the gem-themed puzzle game Bejeweled and made it astronomy-themed. Replacing the jewels were tiny heads of his science professors at Bowling Green.
“It has my professors’ different research areas depicted in the background, and the professors’ heads were dropping down, replacing the blocks,” Crider said. “If you lined up their heads properly, whatever quote they were famous for in the department would appear. I just did it for the hell of it. I wanted to see if I could do it.”
Editing levels on Duke Nukem 3D and creating a modified Bejeweled helped Crider build up his skills in technology as he continued to dive deeper into astronomy. After receiving his bachelor’s degree at Bowling Green, he sought to put both to good use.
“Tony has always been someone who makes things happen,” Smith said. “Some people wait for opportunity to knock. Tony creates opportunities and seeks them out.”
Introducing virtual environments at Elon
When he arrived at Elon in 2002, he found an opportunity to continue with his virtual reality while also teaching about the universe.
“Shortly after I got here, they had this scholar program offering incentives for faculty to try something different in the classroom,” Crider said. “I decided to take a detour from my standard astronomy research and explore how I could make my classroom addictive like World of Warcraft.”
World of Warcraft, the popular online video game, was the perfect storm of virtual socialization, gaming and role playing, according to Crider. He wanted to use its addictiveness in his astronomy classes to give students a reason to learn beyond what was taught in the classroom.
Crider found an ideal match in Second Life, an online world with free, open-source software and no set objective that allowed users to make the game whatever they wanted it to be.
“Someone showed me Second Life, and I felt it could help me take the fun of World of Warcraft and make it astronomy-related,” Crider said. “No one was doing education like this.”
Through Second Life, Crider’s students made real-life museum exhibits virtual. Most of the exhibits were planetariums, although places such as the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro were also created. Open to all Second Life users, the student-created exhibits turned out to be a success, even attracting online users not associated with the class.
“They would build the places, and people would show up afterwards,” Crider said. “What was weird was people would stand in lines at these student-run planetariums with their avatars. But users were at these exhibits, because people online liked the experience of learning.”
The students’ reactions working with Second Life were generally positive, although some mixed reviews did seep through.
“Ten percent of the students were able to dive into ‘Second Life’ and do really well,” Crider said. “The 80 percent below that enjoyed it on a smaller scale. But there was always ten percent in the classes that had the mindset that they don’t want to go online, thinking, ‘It’s too weird, I don’t play video games and it’s not me.’”
That did not stop Crider from pushing the creative envelope in his other classes.
Galactic Astronomy and Life in the Universe
Katie Pullman never felt in control of her education until she took Crider’s “Galactic Astronomy” class.
“It was a small class, so he basically let us design the curriculum,” said Pullman, who graduated from Elon in May. “That made it more fun, and it made all of us want to work harder at the material. ”
Pullman said Crider showed his understanding of students.
“He is great at getting to know the person in the classroom,” she said. “He sees what students excel at and pushes them to reach farther. What he is best at is understanding his students and their interests, and that makes his courses educational and still fun.”
In spring of 2012, Crider took the experimental bits of “Galactic Astronomy” and supercharged them in his “Life in the Universe” class.
“Life in the Universe” focused on the possibility of life and intelligence beyond Earth and how humans could contact them. Crider and Anthony Weston, a professor of philosophy at Elon, have co-taught the Honors course twice.
“Tony is skeptical about intelligent aliens,” Weston said. “I am on the other side. I fully believe that there is intelligent life out there in the universe. It means we never agree easily when teaching the course, and students get to see both sides of the argument.”
The class got to experience both sides of extraterrestrial encounters in one semester-long project. Students were split into two groups, one acting as a group of astronauts in the future and the other as an alien race called the Aurorans. The astronauts captured an Auroran for observation, framing it as a success. The aliens saw differently.
“One Auroran student refused to speak to the astronaut team after class,” Crider and Weston wrote about the project in the Astronomy Education Review. “Even two days later, during a lengthy discussion of the experience, there were lingering emotions.”
Crider and Weston also said members of the Auroran team accused the astronaut team of being overly hostile, beyond what would be expected of reasonable people. The astronaut team admitted its actions seemed hostile from the viewpoint of the Aurorans but were in fact quite representative of human behavior.
Although the class was briefly divided, it quickly got back into working order for the final exam. The only information the students got from Crider and Weston beforehand was to get a good night’s sleep and show up on time.
When they entered the classroom, an 8-foot black monolith, straight out of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” was the only thing in there. No professors, no instructions, nothing.
They were on their own.
The students tried everything they could think of to crack Crider and Weston’s cryptic final. They took a group photo with the monolith. They touched it all at once. They looked for a second monolith on campus. Nothing seemed to work.
Eventually, the class sat down and talked about how difficult it would be for life forms in outer space to contact one another, using the monolith as an example of a possible form of communication.
Crider and Weston, not knowing how the students would react to the unconventional final, saw the discussion as a huge success.
Weston said they are looking to teach “Life in the Universe” one more time. After that, their next course could go in an entirely different direction. He said a co-taught class focusing on virtual realities and their human impact is a possibility.
Next step for virtual environments
With improvements to the Oculus Rift, Crider would be able to let students see what it is like on Venus instead of just reading about it.
“Going to the places that we can’t normally go to is what makes this technology have a lot of potential,” Crider said. “I think that is what a virtual world should be used for. I used to think it was more for the socialization, but my view has changed a lot.”
Crider said there is still a long way to go before these virtual innovations can become reality. Some sort of breakthrough has to happen, much like it has for past technologies.
“Google and Apple began as a couple of guys in a basement not that long ago,” he said. “So the technology for virtual environments that could be dominating the world right now doesn’t exist yet, but it’s possible. We’ve seen this sort of thing happen before.”
When the inevitable breakthrough comes, Crider will be able to explore life-sized moon craters and show off his house with anyone around the world.
Including his grandmother.