Emerging technologies

How do you see virtual reality evolving over the next 10 years? How might that impact classroom education?

Virtual reality has undergone a lot of changes over the last few years as the technology has matured and companies have got a better handle on what applications are most appropriate for VR. When VR first came to the forefront of consumer awareness, most of the expected uses were around gaming and entertainment. Now, however, we’re seeing a shift to more pragmatic use cases in education and enterprise applications like architecture.

I believe that we’ll see hardware prices for VR devices drop sharply over the next few years, which will create more opportunities for schools to integrate them into their technology portfolio. Even as prices drop, the devices will get more powerful, with higher resolution screens and faster processors. This will happen alongside the rollout of high-speed 5G networks, all of which will contribute to richer, more immersive VR environments that really increase the sensation that users are actually somewhere else.

In education, we’ll see VR experiences being used to provide experiences that are hard or even impossible to bring to students today. Google Expeditions, for example, enables students to take field trips to faraway places without the logistical complexity, while companies like Labster let students run full labs without any lab equipment or supplies. More and more of these applications will be created, letting students have a wide range of experiences with a lower investment in highly specific classroom equipment.

Why do you think that emerging technologies like VR and AR have gained so much momentum and interest in recent years?

VR and AR both create new avenues for engaging students in ways that simply weren’t possible before. Students can explore a high-fidelity simulated environment or object, indulging their curiosity and inspiring them to ask unique questions based on what they’re observing. The increased engagement helps students better solidify and retain knowledge about a topic.

Teachers also love seeing the excitement that students experience when they bring VR and AR into the classroom, so they are finding lots of new ways to incorporate the tech into their lessons. As more and more teachers figure out the best ways to integrate VR and AR with their lessons, it gets easier and easier for other teachers to follow suit.

What does it look like when virtual reality is used effectively in classroom instruction? What does ineffective use look like?

We love seeing VR integrated as a way to bring extra depth and engagement to an already thought-out lesson plan, rather than trying to use VR as a lesson substitute. Teachers who use VR successfully will gradually prepare the class for the VR experience through appropriate context building, then put the students in VR to explore and add depth to the earlier context.

We also recommend that teachers keep students engaged during the VR experience itself. Sometimes it can be hard to have students listen to the lesson while they’re excitedly exploring their VR environment, so we encourage an in/out cadence; teachers let students explore for a minute or two, then have the students take their headsets off to ask questions and engage the students face to face. This helps students solidify the learnings from the experience while maintaining their attention throughout.

Tell us about the best example of how you’ve seen virtual reality in action in education.

We visited a classroom that was teaching students about archaeology and the study of ancient civilizations. The teacher started by telling students about the ancient Mesoamerican civilizations and their histories. After the students gained an appreciation for this history, the teacher then put the students into a virtual reality tour of Chichen Itza to let them see and explore the ruins themselves.

After the VR tour, the teacher switched to talk about the practice of archaeology and how archaeologists can infer insights by studying the artefacts that a civilization leaves behind. The teacher pointed out that properties of artefacts can tell us certain things, like how finding an arrowhead suggests that the civilization used bows to hunt.

The teacher then used augmented reality to show a series of Mesoamerican artefacts in the classroom and asked students what they could learn about the civilization from each one. The students were able to look at the objects from all angles, as if they were transported into their classroom, examining them firsthand.

The teacher did a fantastic job using both AR and VR to drive home the lessons that they were trying to convey.

Describe virtual reality in 10 words or less.

The closest we’ll get to teleportation or a time machine.