In today’s day and age, most of us are familiar with VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality), whether seeing it’s futuristic capabilities on screen in movies like Ready Player One, using AR for Snapchat filters, or playing realistic games on the Oculus Quest. In fact, the use of AR and VR has only increased through the pandemic when people have been quarantined by stay at home mandates. Jon Chenney, the co-founder and CEO of AR-based company Seek, wrote that since March 2020, AR usage has increased nearly 600% for their client’s websites.. VR is similarly increasing in usage, as companies and organizations look for ways to increase their ability to reach out to customers and employees alike. However, what’s often overlooked is the role of VR and AR in the world of education, and how it can be used to effectively teach students lessons that were otherwise not attainable. To discuss this important role of VR, we sat down with Steven Sato, a business developer at Engage VR with over 20 years of K-12 experience, to talk about the applications and future of VR in both remote learning and in person school.
Engage VR is a company that provides a platform for advanced virtual reality training and education. As a business developer, Steven's job is to leverage his expertise and knowledge on both K-12 education and the VR industry to get sales needed. “It’s important to be transparent, " Steven enthusiastically replies regarding his sales. Transparency and a customer-oriented process has grown Engage VR, and Steven tells us there are more people looking at Engage than ever before, including K-12 and higher educational institutions.
The primary reason for the massive growth of virtual reality use is its unique ability to create presence in a virtual space, that is not possible over video conferencing. For example, in a social studies class, VR allows students to visit historical sites in different time periods, like during the Civil War. In a biology class, students can do mock dissection as many times as they need to learn about the human heart. They can also practice important medical skills. VR's ability to show a 360 degree field of view allows students to feel like they are learning in a lecture hall or living in their dorm rooms. The versatility of VR applications are especially appealing to lower income schools,, who often don’t have the resources for expensive labs or equipment. VR over time allows new sets of students to learn and relearn the same content in order to gain mastery. The benefits of VR to education are what drove Steven to pursue a career in VR: “I spent 6 years bringing VR into education to integrate access to things that people don’t usually have. Giving people access to this simulation is not only important, it’s cost effective.” Steven tells us another benefit of VR is the social interaction it brings. VR often allows introverted people to express themselves in ways that they usually are uncomfortable doing so in real life. Steven explains, “Someone who is shy or introverted can actually feel a lot more comfortable, you know, interacting and actively participating in class. With VR, the true person comes out.”
The pandemic has greatly affected the popularity of VR as a tool for education. “A lot of people are looking for that personal connection that video platforms can’t deliver,” Steven tells us when asked about differences in VR and traditional technology platforms. “We don’t emote with our faces, we emote with our body language. People really want that ability to express emotion in an online setting.” Percentage-wise, more people have gravitated towards VR, but there are still many roadblocks to overcome until VR is truly integrated in our education system. One of these such roadblocks is the understanding behind how VR affects early learners like those in elementary school and middle school. VR headset manufacturers like Oculus and Sony place safety guidelines on products to recommend users younger than 13 against using any kind of VR technology. This means that although some schools want to pay for the headsets, they do not meet the age requirement to use them, which prevents them from branching into VR learning. Another problem that hinders school’s access to VR is expense. Although VR is much cheaper than traditional labs or equipment, it is not without a decent price. As per Oculus’s homepage, the flagship Oculus Quest will cost you ~$300 with options to upgrade storage making it more pricey. The cost for a classroom set of these is often too expensive for many schools, and they have no choice but to rely on traditional teaching methods.
Steven and his team at Engage have already moved to accommodate these problems and move towards universal VR access. “When it comes to age, what we’ve done is allow the families of students to make the decision for them.” He elaborated further on the idea of the elective: “Student’s parents or guardians get the ability to choose a VR elective or class, which says that they acknowledge the minimal risks and are ok with moving forward.” To mitigate the high cost, programs like Google’s Expeditions offer options like selling inexpensive VR kits or giving detailed instructions on how to repurpose cardboard and a smartphone to build a makeshift headset that is much cheaper than a conventional one. The accommodations made by the VR industry as a whole have clearly worked, as the use of VR in education is growing faster than ever. It is truly becoming a versatile technology that improves the ability to teach, communicate and have presence with students and faculty in an online setting.
In the short term, Steven and his team at Engage want to focus on adding new features to the software behind their technology, and appeal to customer needs: “There’s this big focus on events in VR right now. People want to simulate those conventions and meetings that they can’t have in real life anymore because of you know, Covid.” Steven tells us that the use of VR in education is only going up.. “I think that a big problem is that there’s so much interest in VR right now, but schools can’t pursue that because of social distancing and such. After covid, there’s going to be this huge uptake in VR in schools because that demand will finally have been met.” Although the long-term future is cloudy, Steven had some clear ideas on how VR is going to develop overtime and the goals it will accomplish. “We want VR to become this kind of metaverse that gives you access to things you could never have in real life,” Steven told us. “Of course it’s not going to replace real life, but it’s going to become as close to it as possible.” By all accounts and proven results, it’s clear that VR is only going to become more integrated in our society and our education system. For this reason, there is a good chance that in the next couple of years, you may find yourself walking into your first class of the day in a virtual lecture hall.
Authored by Aniket Dey
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