Being a teacher comes with the challenge of keeping students engaged in their learning. It's simply not enough to create a lesson plan; you have to consider how to incorporate it in your specific classroom. Luckily, teaching in VR (virtual reality) is a possibility. This technology has grown significantly over the years, and according to G2, 26% of teens own a VR device. Here are just four ways teachers can use this unique technology to enhance lesson plans.

1. Virtual Field Trips

Take your class on a field trip regardless of the weather! Use VR devices to take your class to the museum and other educational spots without leaving the classroom. With a VR headset, your class can journey to Fine Art Museums and see sculptures up close or see the pyramids as you talk about the dynasties of Egypt. History no longer has to be about memorizing dates when you can allow students to have interactive experiences related to events and places they're learning about!

2. Simulations

Simulations allow students to get a feel for an experiment without creating a mess and the school tapping into the educational budget. For example, they may simulate how to create a tornado or see a frog's internal organs without doing a physical dissection. Teaching in VR isn't just for kids, either; the military uses simulations of war zones for training, and medical students are learning more about the human body with it as well.

3. Gamification

It's no secret how popular video games are today, and VR is part of the gamification in learning. Students can engage with game characters as they learn about a range of topics. It's a great way to allow students to learn important topics like math or history with the use of avatars they may be able to relate to and have fun with!

4. Language Learning

Learning a foreign language is a great skill, but classrooms don't always teach it well. Students need to be able to practice conversation and hear native accents. Luckily, teaching in VR provides a special language immersion experience that allows students to interact with such native speakers. Their comprehension, pronunciation, and ability to use the language in various situations will surely improve!

The four ways above are just the beginning. Many teachers have reported significantly more excitement about topics after the students have engaged in active learning. One teacher personally observed the breaking of prejudice barriers because these activities took away the physical judgments that youth often unconsciously exhibit. For example, students reported in pilots that they were working with a student that they would not have worked with in the classroom voluntarily. Virtual reality is here to stay, and as an educator, it will be important to engage early and grow with the technology rather than needing to catch up with it as it becomes mainstream. Contact VEDX to learn more about how VR can help your classroom or school today!

As an immersive education provider, VEDX Solutions has believed that our students should have every opportunity to learn with the latest technologies because it is those technologies that they’ll use to build our future. We act on this belief by delivering XR equipment and software to our partner schools while also staking out a presence in the Metaverse, which is a rapidly growing collaborative space. But giving people the chance to learn doesn’t end in the school system. We also bring on young people without much experience in the XR industry to help jumpstart their careers. They only need three things to succeed: a passion for XR technologies, an idea for how to apply them, and the will to make it happen.

Our internship program begins with an education phase in which they apply and expand on their existing skills in a certified online course. Once the course has been completed or the intern feels ready, they will begin discussing their ideas for apps that contribute to immersive education. This is usually done in a small team which will consult with the VEDX Chief Technology Officer, who is their acting mentor. After they have decided on a project or they decide to develop an existing project, the teams will communicate regularly and meet weekly as they work to achieve a prototype for their immersive app. By the completion of an internship, participants will have:

• Greater skills according to their coursework
• Experience working on a development team
• An addition to their portfolio through the creation of a prototype
• Possible opportunities for their project and their career

Our internship program serves also as an opportunity for our team to bring an app to market with VEDX. It is designed as an accelerator opportunity for the internship pod to own their work and bring it to the world. Upon completion of their MVP, the interns will have the opportunity to pitch and find investment for their new application in the market, using VEDX resources and distribution. We believe that innovation is an organic grassroots process.

One of our successful interns Mustafa Akarsu began developing his VR skills in the VEDX Accelerator until he was eventually brought into the company to develop workforce projects as a paid intern. When VEDX gained clients for this project, Mustafa was hired as a full-time Unity Developer and still works with us now on our VR Workforce and 360 Video solutions.

Sunny Jin is a Unity Developer, Shyanne Russel is a 3D Artist, and together they worked on VR app for history education. After several months of work, they completed their prototype. Besides being a proud addition to their portfolio, the app is currently being shared with potential investors and distributors who could turn their work into a full app.

Anyone interested in our mentioned projects or the internship program, feel free to contact: lance.powell@vedx.io

Working as a professional within any field cannot be done in isolation, and this is especially true of those who represent joint disciplines such as education and technology. Increasingly, this is done virtually because it eases the burden of travel, but it could never be a complete replacement for the connections made during in-person events. Being the Chief Technology Officer for VEDX Solutions, it was my privilege to represent our rapidly growing immersive education startup as a speaker at two separate events within the span of a week, one a live conference and the other a virtual summit.

The first was GIST 2022 (Gaming Istanbul), which is the premiere annual gaming and cosplay event in the country of Turkey. Most of VEDX Solutions development work has been within Virtual Reality and, even though education and enterprise make up a substantial portion of the VR market, the majority still belongs to gaming. Moreover, not all of our efforts within VR development act independently of gaming, so there remains significant crossover between the domains of education and entertainment.

While there, myself and other startups found meaningful connections with talented development teams, investors, and potential partners, but the other great value came from learning people’s perception and overall literacy with XR technologies. When I first attended the conference four years ago, I would have to describe first what virtual reality was, but conversations have moved away from that to other topics like the Metaverse and AI. This was a sign to me that the XR market is achieving maturity through awareness as the question has moved from, ‘What is XR?’ to ‘What is XR’s potential for…?’ This came through in the other speakers as well, who have largely given up on Introductions to Immersive gaming to answering questions like, ‘How will this be affected by AI?’ and ‘How do we ensure representation and security within immersive tech?’. My own speech was on even-handed approaches to moderation in the Metaverse, a topic of researched for over five years, and an area in which VEDX plans to be a leader in education. 

The following week, the inaugural Gatherverse E.U. Summit took place, featuring many thought leaders, entrepreneurs, and voices on immersive technologies throughout Europe and beyond. Gatherverse has grown rapidly as a community this year through the endless efforts of Christopher Lafayette, supporters like Euromersive’s Isabel de Peuter-Rutten, and many others. Lafayette has been a primary voice in building human-centered Metaversal and immersive tech that empowers people socially, professionally, and educationally while ensuring their security isn’t compromised or information isn’t used in ways they don’t consent to. Likewise, Euromersive – a group of which I’m a member – promotes these humanity facing values while seeking out support for the local community to make a sustainable ecosystem for the growth of immersive technology, regardless the individual sector. Highlights included speakers like Nina Salomons speaking on the connection between XR and mental health, extremely prolific Metaverse blogger Tom Fiske giving us an overview of the current industry, my long-time colleague within Zero Events Tim Deussen speaking on European Education Platforms in the Metaverse, and Daniel Dyboski Bryant sharing the latest on the Virtual World Society. Given that it was virtual, the event had a wealth of interchange and sharing, and I’m certain to return to watch the presentations I missed. 

Neither I nor VEDX Solutions is stopping there as maintaining an educational technologies community while getting our voices heard requires continuous contact with the community in whatever way possible. Anyone hoping to speak with me or the team should reach out now for whatever reason, and if you have a story to tell, our CEO Jay Schnoor holds regular talks with industry experts which are broadcast within the Metaverse. Also, if you’re an event organizer and think we can be a contribution to your event, let us know, and we can work together to build this forward-facing community in immersive education.

In sociology, dyads are pairings of individuals who have titles that position one member in relation to the other. There are familial dyads, such as parent/child or ex-wife/ex-husband, but this article is more concerned with our societal dyads, like: teacher/student, lawyer/client, boss/employee, and — most importantly — doctor/patient. As virtual reality seeks to integrate with and further convenience our day-to-day interactions, we might expect VR (in cooperation with AI) to supplant the occupational half of the preceding societal dyads. With this in mind, discourse analysts are, or will be, lining up to observe interactions between dyads within a virtual space. The goal is to measure these virtual exchanges in relation to the same meetings in the material world, usually an office, so we might see if any important content of these conversations is lost in virtual exchanges, and we might find methods of correcting for those losses.

Generally, I would be sharing work from researchers of various labs worldwide, but instead I’m including an abstract of my own years-old research into the doctor/patient dyad alongside images of the virtual space being described. It’s meant to be a glimpse into the work being done in this field in the interest of making VR a communication tool incorporable into official, everyday interaction. Furthermore, it represents the level of research that can be achieved with VR, and how students could use this tool to enrich their studies regardless of their educational department.

The Abstract

Title: The Positioning and Role Assignment of Patients During a Medical Interview in Virtual Reality

Discourse between doctors and patients has long been studied due to its intrinsic power asymmetry and the importance of compliance gaining to the process, but, modernly, virtual reality is encroaching on this field, which could traditionally only be done in person. In light of these technological advancements, it becomes vital to understand how patients position themselves regarding their virtual healthcare providers as to ensure the quality of medical care is maintained. This study seeks to begin this work by analyzing the responses to questions typical of a medical checkup, looking specifically at evidence of role assignment and characterization of a virtual doctor and themselves. To accomplish this, the author created an avatar and virtual environment representative of a doctor and their office, where health-related questions would be administered.

Planning for the future effectively requires serious reflection on what gives our lives value while also overcoming continuation bias, which is an inner voice trying to convince us that access to those things could never be interrupted. Those with the imagination to contemplate the humanity altering events and have the resources to act introduce contingency plans, so there is continuity in various aspects of modern life even though the value we continue to derive will come in a drastically different form. On a grand scale, privately funded Mars missions seek to find a multiplanetary existence that will allow for physiological continuity in case our home planet becomes uninhabitable. At a local level, personal physiological continuity is pursued by people who stockpile food in order to outlast the effects of societal breakdowns or supply chain failures.

But “life is about more than surviving”, and for many, the primary vehicle for our needs of esteem and self-actualization is education. We go through education to become globally and historically conscious while gathering the skills needed to participate in the modern workforce; at least as importantly, we gain lifelong social networks and learn about ourselves in relation to our peers, giving us better direction through the stages of our life. Since disruptions to education no longer need to be imagined as we’ve very recently lived through them, parents, students, and educators are looking for technological solutions that are more than just mediums of information distribution.

Video conferencing has been a useful stopgap measure, but it’s been almost universally dissatisfying to students, who realize they are missing out on the fun and friendships that accompany in-person education. This dissatisfaction extends to teachers, who struggle to motivate their students as they naturally recede from the subject matter since they cannot engage with a class through a 2D screen. In the past two years, it’s become common in university classes for teachers to endure an entire semester without ever speaking to some students or even once looking them in the eye.

This is where educational services like VEDX Solutions enter to bridge the gap between distance learning limitations and student needs. We and our partner companies provide both hardware and software to schools that are seeing drops in attendance and enrollment because students or their parents feel like they can no longer function under these conditions. The opportunities for immersive education have emerged with the availability of easy-to-use, standalone, 6DoF headsets at a price point within reach for most people, especially if we consider the prices in the context of education. Their experience in VR, either as a replacement or supplements for Zoom classes, is engaging to students since it allows for more freedom of expressions and a return to spatial awareness that is lacking on a flat video call. There are unique ways of interacting with peers while teachers have greater access to features which allow them to teach in exciting new ways.

As a partner, Engage has been offering lecture spaces for years, and they combine their powerful features with classroom settings to create learning experiences that are memorable and enjoyable. The shared experience of witnessing 360 videos that bring students to the world’s most thrilling historical sites and launch them across the solar system will keep classes talking about it for days or weeks after. Classes may be synchronous (in real time) or asynchronous, and teachers can include video and audio content for a multi-media learning experience.

Multiverse also allows for lectures while specializing in ownership of spaces and activity hubs. Schools can wander through museum spaces on astronomy or psychology for an hour and retreat to their private campus to talk about the things they saw first-hand. Privately owned spaces may be decorated to reflect school spirit, or the course subjects as needed.

Remio is a partner that works to combine collaboration and fun, which will be much appreciated by any class. Teachers may give a presentation with slides and 3D models using their native tools, students can go to the conference room to brainstorm about the topic and share their individual perspectives, and if time remains, they can have a teambuilding experience through VR gaming. This is an especially effective platform for dynamic experiences and group cohesiveness.

We offer more than virtual classrooms through our partners, but we help with soft skills training through our partners at Bodyswaps. There are also unique 360 apps from VEDX that focus on career exploration for young people nearing graduation. VEDX can also work on custom solutions in-house or with our partners where needed.

Whether your school is setting up a lab that will remain on campus or setting up VR solutions for distance education through your school, VEDX Solutions can help you with this overwhelming process with our training and support. It’s never been more important to guarantee continuity of education for our young people, so schedule a discovery call and let’s see what we can do together.

The demand for virtual education has surged in recent years. In part, this has been driven by advances in VR technologies, but the circumstances of COVID-19 and the need for uninterrupted education has directed many schools towards virtual solutions as it’s widely acknowledged that a hybrid plan, if not a completely virtual plan, is needed. What’s often overlooked in these analyses are the actual preferences and preparedness of the students who are at the center of this educational trend.

Working adults have seemingly embraced the hybrid model according to many polls. This recent poll by McKinsey shows that only a small minority want to return fully to the office and, in fact, globally a majority of people want the majority of their working days to be performed remotely. The popularity of this trend may stem from practical concerns such as having the flexibility to care for one’s family while avoiding the time and expense of a long commute, but young students generally don’t share these responsibilities and won’t relate to these concerns. Additionally, adults who regularly attended meetings in their office often don’t find Zoom meetings to be qualitatively different, but your average student will almost certainly feel like their missing out on the school a campus/classroom experience.

When in-person classes become untenable, teachers cannot simply share a Zoom link with their students and expect it to be a reasonable substitute, which is why we need to find solutions that speak to the experience of youth culture and enable an improved classroom experience (at least over video conference calls) that allows for embodied interactions with their peers and teachers. In my opinion, that solution is exporting parts of education to virtual worlds, especially virtual worlds found in VR.

Virtual Worlds aren’t a phenomenon that sprung from the recent, widespread adoption of VR headsets. While some arrived concurrently, there are other virtual worlds that arrived much earlier. Three popular virtual worlds, each with valuations in the billions of dollars and nine-figure player numbers, which are still ubiquitous amongst young students are Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox. While Fortnite may have begun as a battle royale game, it has expanded its scope to become and event space, creative space, social hub, and venue for team building. Minecraft and Roblox are also known for having creative communities which are as prolific as they are young, and they provide some children with a steady income as they craft and create digital goods that they sell for real-world money on the marketplace. These virtual worlds have provided young people with a thriving social network, creative outlets, an in-game culture, and money-making opportunities. If this much social and economic engagement is already happening in virtual worlds, bringing education into those virtual spaces is a natural outcome.

As any technologist knows, the success or failure of a new technology isn’t always a consequence of its inherent utility, but it’s often the result of timing, i.e. Are people ready for it? To understand the timing of virtual worlds, let’s take the example of Club Penguin, which is a virtual world created for children (8-12 years old). In 2013, this virtual platform had 200 million registered users; they were adapting to engagement in digital spaces while the experience become normalized across their generation. Presumably, many of those children moved on from Club Penguin, perhaps to virtual worlds more suited to their demographic. Now, it’s the year 2021, and many of those primary-school children playing Club Penguin in 2013 are now in high school preparing for university. By now, nearly all college-age students have visited a virtual world, and many have been regularly using virtual worlds for most of their lives. Either by design or circumstance, the generation heading to university now has been preparing their entire lives for a virtual-world education platforms thanks to the entertainment platforms that came before.

Accessing virtual world for education through VR headsets could only make the educational experience more enriching. As students, you’re immersed in environments seeped in history or science; language students can participate in a virtual class and apply their knowledge through role playing in virtual environments. Even more, Virtual Reality gives you the sense of presence that exceeds flatscreen experiences and video conferencing, allowing you to have more natural and enjoyable interactions within a shared space. If you’re a teacher or school administrator who want to learn more about bringing XR and virtual worlds to your school, please contact us through our website or LinkedIn.

The advancement of virtual spaces, whether facilitated by personal computers or XR technology, has been instructive with regards to our collective approaches to design and how much material reality is reflected in those spaces.

Material versions of productive spaces such as schools and businesses would hardly integrate vestigial elements into their design. Upon doing a complete diagnostic of these same elements imported from the material world to the virtual, almost nothing that remains seems practical.

Before talking about educational spaces and the various virtual reality tools for education, let’s talk about an exception to the practicality gap that exists between material and digital objects: Real Estate Properties.

Searching for homes as a place to live or invest in can be time-consuming and impractical if the buyer is not currently in the vicinity. Therefore, having a virtual option on hand simplifies the process by giving them more confidence in their purchase before venturing there in person.

Making decisions for the virtual version is simple -- complete reproduction -- since the end goal is to get the buyer into the physical space and meet their expectations for it beforehand.

Also, while an existing property can be photographed in 360, a property under construction would be built using software with virtual/VR capabilities, the virtual space would still represent the finished product and, for the same reason, be filled with objects suggestive of a home or office.

With that in mind, why would we want virtual classrooms that look like their material counterparts?

We may begin with the example of a window, whose purpose for the classroom is primarily to provide ventilation and natural light. The virtual version of this scene serves neither of these needs, but they’re often built into the scene.

More troublingly, since nothing really exists outside that wall, an exterior also needs to be built to make it a more complete representation of a real classroom. As most people will conclude, these windows exist merely for the illusion of openness, making people ignore the fact that the same four walls/colliders are keeping them in that confined space.

Similar comments could be made about other elements such as stairs or ceilings as well.

In Peter Ludlow’s excellent paper ‘The Social Furniture of Virtual Worlds’ (2019), he discusses virtual chairs in some depth since there is no need to sit, or at least sit comfortably, in virtual spaces. He also takes inspiration from Chalmer (2017), who writes about the casual power of these digital objects to give social contexts to virtual behavior.

Within the educational context, desks serve the same lack of function as you can use neither to sit nor use it as a surface to take notes on.

It’s true that a sitting or standing position may offer a perspective more amenable to the classroom, but this may be solved by adjusting the viewer position up-and-down in settings regardless of the actual physical position of the user or the existence of digital furniture.

Features of spatial design for the teacher may include a stage, whiteboard, and podium; depending on the position of the students, a stage may provide a superior vantage point, an interactable whiteboard might be helpful for instruction, but a non-interactable board or a podium has no discernable purpose.

If these elements of a virtual classroom only serve to help find the best line of sight, why would they require the guise of desks and stages? More abstractly, the desks could be floating cubes arranged in a semi-circle around a larger cube which serves as the stage; or more fancifully, the desks could be replaced with toadstools in a mythic forest while the instructor teaches from atop the head of a giant tortoise.

So why settle for the overly familiar environments of a classroom when we could have something easier to develop or more interesting visually?

Recently, Sadler and Thrasher of the University of Illinois did a survey of real-world teachers by taking them to seven different Social VR spaces and asking which they deemed most suitable for teaching.

As a longtime virtual world practitioner, I was shocked and dismayed that they chose a less-functional/feature-light platform (not naming names but it would have been my last choice) simply because it was most easily recognized as a classroom environment.

On reflection, I understood their decision to be based on a sense of safety and satisfaction along with their ignorance on how they can use virtual reality tools for education. Especially their inability to take advantage of all the tools and VR apps due to the lack of formal instruction or training.

However, the comfort that comes from familiarity is short-lived since the mind tires of the sameness and seeks out other available possibilities. Likewise, ignorance is short-lived since a teacher will require features from the real-world class, and the limitations and possibilities of each VR app will quickly become apparent.

In conclusion, fidelity to the material version of a classroom is just a stepping stone to a more dynamic, functional, and visually interesting. As teachers learn how to use the many virtual reality tools for education in their instructions, it will expand the horizons of the instructional experience, and their students will follow them towards an education that is more accessible and designed specifically for them.

For more information about how we can bring VR to your school or institution, please contact us. Lance Powell is an experienced teacher trainer for virtual worlds, and you’re welcome to contact us for teacher training services as well.