Research IT

Christmas Research IT Club

Come along to the Research IT club in December to find out more about all the large research IT infrastructure procurements that are coming soon as well as the use of HTC Vive Pro in VR teaching. There will also be a presentation from Malcolm Whitehouse, CIO of IT Services about his vision for a digital university.

The agenda and abstracts for the event are below. If you would like to attend the event on the 11th December at 2pm in Roscoe then please register. There may even be Christmas mince pies!

Updates from the Research IT teams

  • Research Lifecycle Project
  • Research Infrastructure
  • Research Software Engineering

Evaluation of the HTC Vive Pro in higher education teaching

Dr Antony Payton, Division of Informatics, Imaging & Data Sciences, School of Health Sciences

VR hardware and education software have been developing rapidly over the past 2 years but haven't managed to gain traction in mainstream higher education teaching. The newly formed Institute for Integrated Interdisciplinary Healthcare Science (I3HS) hub within the University of Manchester are evaluating the use of the HTC Vive Pros between Nov and Jan. Here we'll present the results so far and also show a short video clip of a kidney donation that we filmed in November using the Insta360Pro and a laparoscopic camera that can be used as cheap and effective VR teaching material.The Digital University

Malcolm Whitehouse, CIO IT Services, University of Manchester

This presentation covers the potential opportunities and challenges associated with digital transformation in Higher Education.

It does not attempt to prescribe what the University of Manchester should do at this point in time – albeit it does touch on some of the things we have started to put in place as capabilities towards being a digital university. Having digital projects and some point in time applications does not make an organisation digitally – but it is the ability to re-imagine an institution in light of technology and consider how we could do things to reinvent the way we do our core activities – that is at the heart of “digitalisation” – as opposed to the more mundane “digitisation”.