The Simple Mixed Reality Project
This project will take place internationally in early 2023. Updates to the project will be posted here.
VIRTUAL REALITY HAS FAILED EDUCATION
Virtual reality (where you put some sort of headset on and see/hear/interact with a different reality) has been around for quite some time, riding alternate waves of popularity and failure. Wild predictions about the future of the technology have always abounded, including Goldman Sachs saying in 2016 the VR/AR market would reach $182 billion in revenue by 2025 and replace television. Similarly, in education, VR has also been promoted as a gleaming utopian vision: attentive groups of students with the latest headsets learning in flawless sophisticated and simultaneous simulations, at one with technology. Sometimes they’re not even in a classroom, because their magnificent virtual setups don’t require them to leave the house. The reality is something very different – few institutions can afford this vision, and even for the lucky few that can, they are of virtually no use to distance education teachers and students, and for most educators the technology may as well not exist. Educators should feel empowered and enabled to use mixed, augmented, and virtual reality to promote learning, no matter where they are and what their budget.
Now before the haters come for me (and there is most certainly a subset of educators who cling stubbornly to only this gleaming vision), my PhD was about virtual reality, I’ve conducted VR experiments with students and vendors around the world (and continue to do so), and I’ve seen some behind-the-scenes demonstrations of the technology that knocked my socks off. I am both genuinely excited about the future of the technology and also acutely aware of how it is miles away from that vision at present. Some will claim showing a small amount of off the shelf VR experiences (that do nothing to address specific pedagogical problems) as “doing VR in schools” and call it a day. This is the not the case. It may well be that there is usefulness in showing students what the tech looks like at a basic level, but due to its generic nature it can only serve as a technological taster, not the full meal that students need to make it work as a genuine part of the curriculum. Getting virtual (and augmented) reality right at a sophisticated level requires a hefty mix of hardware, pricey developers, rock-solid internet and solutions to problems that are actually suited to the technology and the pedagogy.
So, what’s the solution? Am I saying we just put the tech on ice till it somehow reappears, perfectly formed, in the future? Not at all. However, I am asking educators to juggle their justifiably heightened expectations of this technology in the future with perhaps more modest applications in the present. If we step away from utopia, what can all educators actually use that is free (or as close to it as possible), and flexible? From the VR point of view, it is remarkably easy to create a high quality 360-degree image, or photosphere. This is a static image of one area, from every angle, using tools such as Google Street View, on the phones that we already have in our pockets. We may think of Street View as a tool only for stalking our friends’ houses or checking out what Disneyland looks like from the outside, but it has a simple and yet sophisticated image creation side. Once we have a few of these photospheres, we can then embed them in various free online tools to create a narrative and overlay with audio (that we can also record free on the phone) and images, and text.
To put this into an educational perspective: an educator in an upcoming project of mine in Asia identified that creativity is not taught or valued as much as she would like in her part of the world, so she is using the above tech to have her students show us what a day in their home life looks like. The students use their phones to create photospheres, and then are guided to create their own narrative using audio and text, and then share with their colleagues – and in fact, all over the world. End users can view these photospheres in a browser by moving their mouse, or on a mobile phone or tablet by waving their device around, and it will reveal all 360 degrees of their creations. A simple solution for sure, but all free, using tools they already have. There are also extremely cheap VR viewers which can be best compared to opera glasses that can be slipped over the front of mobile phones to create a simple but perfectly acceptable form of genuine VR immersion. We identified a problem, and a genuine solution, using VR and immersive technology that anyone can utilise.
Similar solutions are being developed as part of this project with medical education in Canada (helping simulate stressful environments like emergency rooms or ambulances to students in advance of actually being in them), hotel rooms in Hong Kong (demonstrating to cleaners what is to be cleaned and how long it should take), and ancient European tourist sites that are crying out for more background story to immerse students in history. We are also exploring augmented reality options where educators place virtual objects in real-world locations and students view them through their phones in multiple innovative ways, including real-world “treasure hunts” where students are led from clue to clue, being surreptitiously educated on the landmarks and history surrounding them along the way. All free, or extremely close to it.
These solutions are simple, and so are the outcomes. Additionally, the free apps and software can be a little inflexible or limited. But – when you consider many educators and students (remote students in particular) are excluded from higher end solutions, it’s worth taking a step back, dropping pretentions and seeing this as a crafty use of free technology to enchant students and provide a solution that might just be the right fit for now. It’s time to think small.