The number of activities taking space in the extended reality space these days is truly accelerating at a dizzying pace. Frankly, it’s just impossible to keep up. And not every little revelation is worthy of a dedicated article. The only answer seems to be a periodic curation of interesting developments, products or thinking.
And that’s what I have here: just a selection of “grab bags” of the most delicious, noteworthy or insufferable efforts emerging from the educational XR world. Open any bag, and with delightful expectation (or a wink and a shudder), take a look. Of course, the running commentary is all mine.
Mobile VR Experiences. If you can’t obtain the dedicated space for virtual reality equipment in an educational setting, why not do as Brown University is doing, and make it mobile and serendipitous? See mobile VR.
An AR Summit. An “Augmented Reality in K-12 Education Summit” is planned for November 8 and 9, featuring 35+ global speakers and 2000+ attendees. Best of all, the online live streaming is free of charge.
What Creative Schools Do with AR. While attending a webinar this week, I discovered one more thing that amazing schools do with AR these days: they have their students build a museum experience—an AR timeline of medical history—throughout the halls of the school, an experience that can be viewed by students, parents and community in a walkabout format. See AR Museum. No such thing as hiding student creativity behind the closed doors of the classroom.
It’s All a Fairy Tale. I recently attended a university presentation entitled “The Virtual Reality Fairy Tale Library”. Evidently, this university library system’s special collection contains a number of rare and classic fairy tales, all held in climate controlled environment, with limited access to the public. The librarians wanted to enlarge patron access to these resources by rendering each fairy tale into a virtual reality walkthrough experience. Not a bad idea for extending the reach of rare and protected resources.
More is More. Also in Colorado, Colorado State University has rolled out an “Immersive Reality Training Lab” in their Health Education Outreach Center featuring more than of 100 VR stations. The real plus here is that students can work in collaborative groups of four (although only two have haptic control) as opposed to the typical VR experience with undesirable separation and solitude. I suspect this new collaborative approach could lead to more interesting student discussions and higher-end problem solving.
In the uncertain and unplanned world of grab bagging, as is always a distinct possibility, questionable rewards sometimes appear at the bottom of a bag. Here are some of the more unsatisfying bags, although I confess, one person’s trash may be another person’s treasure:
VR as Schizophrenia. I recently attended a university conference presentation focused on a medical project entitled “Using Virtual Reality Game Environments to Empathize and Care for Patients Diagnosed with Schizophrenia”. Basically, the project created a virtual world that people could roam around in, but then it went one step further: the VR game attempted to simulate what a person with schizophrenia might be going through, e.g., hearing sounds and voices, as though they are inside your head. The project’s purpose was to generate empathy for people with schizophrenia. And since a schizophrenic experience itself can be disturbing, “training was required before and after the experience”, according to the presenter. Dealing with “constant talk becomes the focus”, not navigating the virtual world. I don’t want to be disrespectful, but I am certain that most of the audience thought that this was a really poor idea, on many levels, for a VR application.
More is Less. I know I’m confusing the reader by listing the same CSU VR lab described above in my ugly bag group, but there’s a very good reason for doing so. In short, my hopes were deflated when I saw their focus—anatomy. Ho hum. Been there, done that. In fact, everyone developing VR/AR (or 3D content for that matter) for the last ten years had emphasized anatomy. It’s such a predictable and unnecessary go-to. And with anatomy being such a small part of overall medical curriculum, it seems like such a huge expense for so little pay off. I all can say is “[yawn]…”
A Content Explosion…or Not. I ran into this impressive list of educational apps now available for tethered VR, and it first blush, it looks pretty exciting, doesn’t it? Then I returned to the real world and began thinking through the actual numbers. It’s always important to “do the math.” This colorful infographic certainly suggests that VR content is well on its way to prominence in the ed market. But the truth is that if you count these apps, and perhaps any new or unlisted apps that didn’t make this list, the amount of educational content remains dismally low. Although the visual mapping is inspired, when you count the possible number of learning objectives in any curriculum that could be addressed with VR, and track that against the available content, the resulting curricular ‘coverage’ perhaps represent less than 1/100th of one percent of possible learning targets. Mark this off as more hype. –Len Scrogan
