The study took place with about 100 middle school students taking a brief “virtual field trip” to learn about climate science. Some students experienced the field trip while wearing a VR headset, while others watched the same material in standard video on a computer screen.
“higher ratings of presence, interest, and enjoyment,”
The paper noted an obvious logistical benefit to virtual field trips over getting on a bus for an in-person outing. “Virtual field trips make it possible to experience things that are too expensive, dangerous, or impossible in the real world,” it says. The experiment did not address the difference in educational value between a real-world field trip and a virtual one.
for programs like nursing, pharmacy and medicine, VR seems promising for teaching some skills, as a piece of a broader curriculum that includes in-person hands-on learning as well.
My (his) main research interests are augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) as well as camera networks. This includes building novel 3D user interfaces (e.g., using projection mapping or VR headsets) that adapt the layout of spatial UI elements based on implicit user input (e.g., gaze data) and building toolkits for room-scale interfaces. More recently, I also investigate different realities afforded by the combination of VR devices and camera networks.
In the simplest explanation, the metaverse is just a sexy, aspirational name for some kind of virtual or augmented-reality play. Facebook owns a company called Oculus, which manufactures and sells VR computers and headsets. Oculus is also making a 3-D, virtual platform called Horizon—think Minecraft with avatars, but without the blocks. Facebook, Apple, and others have also invested heavily in augmented reality, a kind of computer graphics that uses goggles to overlay interactive elements onto a live view of the world. So far, the most viable applications of VR and AR can be found in medicine, architecture, and manufacturing, but dreams of its widespread consumer appeal persist. If those dreams become realized, you’ll probably end up buying crap and yelling at people through a head-mounted display, instead of through your smartphone.
some of the implications of people spending significantly more time in immersive 3D environments that provide alternative “realities” to the physical world.
So while we know that there are incredible applications for emergent technologies such as VR/AR, the goal for organizations isn’t to look to implement these types of solutions immediately while in the midst of a pandemic, adding layers of training and cost concerns to the already existing uncertainty. Rather, an approach that involves short and long term planning as well as data collection to inform decision making is a much more prudent approach.
Spatial, the former augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) collaboration platform, has today announced a significant company evolution to become the metaverse for cultural events such as NFT exhibitions, brand experiences, and conferences, whether on web, mobile, or VR.