Brown-RISD Master of Arts in Design Engineering

Adam Blumenthal, virtual reality artist-in-residence at Brown University, is a man who keeps his door open. Brown students, known for their intellectual curiosity, are unlikely to pass up a chance to discover something new.

So when Blumenthal set up shop in the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts in May 2016 and launched into an immersive virtual reality (VR) project focused on the Revolutionary-era Gaspee Affair, intriguing a team of young scholars—who then volunteered to pitch in— took no time at all.

Fast forward a year or so, and Blumenthal and 14 undergraduates in a group independent study project titled Virtual Reality for Education have collaborated on an educational VR experience that, when completed, can teach middle and high school students about  a significant event in the march toward the American Revolution.

“There’s a dotted line from the Gaspee Affair to the Declaration of Independence,” Blumenthal said of the 1772 incident in which Rhode Island colonists boarded and burned the HMS Gaspee, a British Royal Navy schooner helmed by a captain with a reputation for confiscating cargo and harassing merchants and fishermen.

Blumenthal said this local, dramatic and historically important story was ideal for an immersive educational experience because VR can simulate the sensation of presence in an environment that’s otherwise impossible to enter and surround users in contexts where new insights can be gleaned.

When all is said and done, students will be able to learn about the events by donning a pair of VR goggles and virtually entering a tavern where reenactors discuss plans to board the ship, traveling in a rowboat up Narragansett Bay toward the target, or listening in as officials debate how best to punish the colonists for their acts.

To create such an innovative educational experience is no small undertaking.