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Virtual Education
Imagine “walking” through the Louvre or Vatican City, exploring every nook and being able to examine every aspect in detail. The next day, you might explore the ruins of Vietnam or even the now-destroyed ancient monuments of Iraq and Syria. Or look all around you at the copious sea life of the Great Barrier Reef without need of SCUBA gear.
Since this video is produced by a video game publisher (and development software leader), it references games. But the future of Virtual Reality, if this truly does get off the ground at last, isn’t just gaming.
Throughout history, only a relative handful of people have had the wealth, the leisure time, and the ability to explore sites and wonders far beyond the borders of their own nations. Modern Americans frequently see them represented in books and TV shows. Even today, though, most people do not travel internationally.
VR technology could enable people to travel instantly for hundreds of dollars rather than thousands. Schools and public libraries could cheaply make a variety of such experiences available to all. You won’t need weeks away from work or other responsibilities. If your phone rings, answer it … and rejoin your “international” experience in a few minutes. If your old bones are too stiff and sore for walking, that’s alright; you won’t need them to see the world.
Of course, there is more to travel than static sights alone. There are people to meet, smells, foods, and unscripted experiences. But, again, not everyone has access to such trips. Even those who do typically can only make a handful of international trips in a lifetime. Better a simulated experience than no experience at all, yes?
Some major software publishers, like Microsoft and Sony, have expressed confidence in this new VR tech. I’ll withhold my enthusiasm until it hits the consumer market in the next year. But it might just be the next big evolution in educational access.
Published in Culture, Education
Amazing. I love the exploration angle and its potential for science and history teachers.
Three things:
1.) How do you move forward in the virtual environment? Is there potential of making this a great way to exercise?
2.) It seems like they’ve been talking about VR for twenty years or so. The headset is familiar already.
3.) Gloomy: All we need is even more inexpensive immersive environments so participants lock themselves away from people and healthy, balanced lifestyles. (In the case of children and adults who already spend so much time gaming.)
South Park’s version is pretty good too. I would like to try one of these out. Thanks.
That was my first question as well. Some companies are making peripheral hardware, like this omni-direction walking pad, to enable VR users to not only walk but even run and jump (with rails to prevent you from accidentally leaping off the pad). That could indeed be real exercise.
But past forays into full-body motion-control devices, like Nintendo’s Wii and Microsoft’s Kinect, have shown that people generally prefer to relax. So there will be alternatives like handheld controllers or gloves. Commanding your avatar to walk forward could be as simple as leaning forward or touching two fingers together. Software developers will attempt their own solutions.
I was most surprised to learn that the headset actually strains the eyes less than a TV or computer screen. That’s because it allows the eyes to focus as if they are looking far away. Some have worn the headsets for as long as 7 hours straight without problems.
Perhaps the best reason for hope is that there is healthy competition between more than a few VR devices set to enter the market in the next couple years.
I’m sure virtual families will be available.
Imagine looking at an aircraft engine with all of the parts labeled and with info tabs attached that allow you to summon up images showing what abnormal wear looks like.
There are a lot of potential applications – as many as there are stars in the sky.
Ooo – stars in the sky! A planetarium in your backpack!
Or maybe stage wires, as in this Chris Farley scene:
When I long ago worked in VR development, I imagined what I thought was a hilarious VR interface device: the viewer would wear an accordion on their chest, and they would fly through virtual space by pumping the accordion; the more manically they pumped, the faster they would fly.
(No one I’ve ever told this idea to has ever found this funny — even though accordions are, per se, in their very nature, objectively comical. I now have a larger audience to test it on. If none of you thinks this is funny and start looking askance at me, I will drop it and never bring it up again to another living soul.)
The louvre is hot and smells bad.
Virtual reality would be an improvement.
This is going to change a lot of ‘things’.
I saw a video a few years ago where BMW had their mechanics use a heads up type display to show them exactly where and how to do very specific car repairs and do them absolutely correctly.
A fellow I’ve worked with is consulting with an educational company using this tech for education. Imagine going through history, really going through history? Or visiting museums or architectural digs or even studying nature with the aid of these devices? He explained they were using the mapping of Mars to do a VR travel across Mars concept, whoa!
When I saw the Mona Lisa in person, it was surrounded by a jammed crowd of Japanese tourists. It was impossible to approach.
Likewise, when I saw the painted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the chapel was crowded too thick for serene thought… and the ceiling is so high that you see much of it better in books anyway.
In a simulated environment, I could be all alone with Da Vinci’s painting for as long as I want. I could change the lighting and see it from any distance. And I could gradually select other paintings from the Louvre, the Prado, the Smithsonian, and elsewhere — only the particular paintings I prefer — to fill my own custom museum of art.
I could spend hours in a virtual Sistine Chapel, alone, while listening to Gregorian chant or opera, or to discourses on theology or art history. I could raise myself up to the ceiling for a closer view. I could sit in on a representation of a historical Mass there, perhaps celebrated by a priest long dead.
The possibilities are limited only by our imaginations.
I teach distance education biology. I was discussing this with another professor, who said DE isn’t really teaching, and I think as it stands right now that is true. However, as the technology improves, I think that teachers and students will be able to interact virtually (“virtually”!) as well as they can face to face.
Hey Arron Cork screw bbq opens in Old Town Spring in Nov. I’ll buy.
35 years of Building 3D models of petro/chemical plants. Overlaying CADD models on a point cloud to determine interferences. Virtual is cool stuff with real world value. And to your point a fantastic way to share knowledge.
But …..
Nothing beats the real thing!
Virtual Reality is the real deal this time around. In the past, ‘VR’ has been low resolution, with choppy frame rates and bulky hardware. Wearing a VR headset was almost guaranteed to give you motion sickness.
But this time it’s really different. VR has benefited from the rapid advance in sensors and displays driven by the smart phone market. In addition, we are just reaching the point in hardware evolution where we can display enough pixels to give you a true sense of reality at a frame rate high enough to prevent motion sickness.
This changes everything.
The holy grail of VR is ‘presence’. Presence happens when your senses are tricked to the point where your brain suddenly switches over and accepts what you are seeing as being the ‘real’ reality. The feeling of looking through a window at another world goes away, and suddenly you just feel like you are IN that world.
I own an Oculus Dev Kit (V1), and the feeling of presence is sometimes there, and sometimes not. Mostly not, even though looking around at the environment is very cool.
But with the new generation of headsets, the feeling of ‘presence’ is very strong. And it’s addicting and wonderful. For the first time, you can really be transported to another place, another time, and honestly feel like you are there.
I believe this has the ability to fundamentally transform education, gaming, social media, travel, and fund whole new models of entertainment and productivity.
For example, imagine a camera mounted on the 50 yard line of the Superbowl, with a gimbal mount that allows it to rotate around or look up and down. Now imagine that you are sitting at home wearing your VR headset, and you subscribe to a service that lets you connect to that camera. Now you are AT the superbowl. You are sitting on the 50 yard line, with just as good a view as anyone else. You can turn your head to follow the play, look around the stadium, and basically have the same experience as the people who are there.
How much would people pay for that? Now imagine similar cameras in Indy Car racers, in the Louvre, on the helmets of skydivers, on submersibles and spacecraft – suddenly we all have the ability to experience the full range of human drama, in real time.
The social implications are huge. There is already an application that acts like a large movie theater. You can connect to it with your friends and watch a movie together, each of you feeling like you’re sitting in a beautiful theater with a hi-def movie running. You can share the experience with people around the world.
This is just the tip of the iceberg – the stuff easily predictable. With enough users and a market for ‘VR apps’, the invention possibilities are tremendous.
My philosophy professor once proposed that a major way we distinguish reality from dreams is continuity. Reality is episodic: it begins each day where it ended the night before. If a virtual experience with strong and consistent presence did that — akin to an open world adventure game like Skyrim — there might be some interesting psychological effects.
Gaming platforms already offer features that enable users to be alerted when a specified amount of time has passed or even to shut down automatically after the elapsed time. For now, it’s mainly a tool for parents to monitor children’s play time and for busy adults to better manage their schedules. But VR systems might eventually need to provide HUD messages or even tactile alerts (similar to phone vibration) to jar users out of their reveries.
That video by Epic Games is just the first in a series. Further videos can be found at their Twitter page as they are released.