Transforming Education through Virtual and Augmented Reality by Nicole

Transforming Education through Virtual and Augmented Reality by Nicole - February 2018 Scholarship Essay

Technology has already transformed education in ways that were unimaginable only several decades ago - think the Internet, Google search, online learning and courses, SmartBoards and iPads in the classroom, etc. But there is one technology, though relatively new, which combines nearly all the previous technologies in a novel, creative way and has the potential to entirely transform the learning experience: virtual reality (VR).

Virtual reality (VR) - which immerses a user in computer-generated, interactive environment, usually through a headset - and augmented reality (AR) - which overlays elements of virtual reality onto the real world - will have a profound impact on education. The primary scientific fields which have enabled VR, computer graphics and computer vision, are relatively young fields and emerged as defined disciplines only around the 1950s and 1960s, and commercial VR and AR technologies have only emerged as viable industries in the 2000s. But based on increasing societal demand for technology, the resulting expansion of the once fledgling fields of computer science and electrical engineering, and extensive investment in related technologies - Facebook's acquisition of the VR company Oculus, for example, or Google's development of self-driving cars - it is clear that interest in the industries and scientific fields related to VR will only continue to grow and allow the specialized research needed to develop cutting-edge VR technology. It is very conceivable that in twenty years, advances in computer graphics and computer vision, as well as in the computing power of hardware, will have rendered reliable, high-tech, affordable VR headsets available for widespread educational use.

The primary advantage of VR over traditional education methods is that it can take you anywhere and can hypothetically simulate any environment. Flight simulators, in one version or another, have been used for military training since the early 1900s. As one might expect, VR has already shown immense promise in military training applications, including enabling extremely realistic flight simulators and parachute training simulations, and allowing astronauts to "experience" and train in the environment of outer space while still on Earth.

The other incredible capability of VR is that it immerses you in an environment. When you are wearing a VR headset, you see, hear, and experience everything in the virtual environment and nothing else; you are essentially moving and living in that world. Hence VR has the capability to tell stories like no book or video can; the field of immersive journalism, which has emerged within the last decade, has used VR to communicate stories such as the prison experience of Guantanamo Bay or the Syrian Civil War. Demonstrations of immersive journalistic pieces often leave viewers totally enraptured, moving and responding emotionally as if they were actually in the environment the headset is depicting. Not only does VR have the potential to transform how powerfully we experience news stories from around the world, but it can also be used in museums and in the classroom to experience, say, the amphitheaters of the Roman Empire or the protests of the African-American Civil Rights Movement in a totally immersive, interactive environment.

VR has virtually limitless educational possibilities; not only does it communicate information more efficiently, by providing simultaneous visual, auditory, and pseudo-tactile stimuli, it is completely immersive, demands the user's attention, and will make learning more exciting and memorable. Students can take virtual field trips anywhere, anytime - Ms. Frizzle's fantastic adventures in the Magic School Bus will soon become a real option for classrooms everywhere. Classroom learning can also be supplemented with augmented reality to play educational games, or, say, demonstrate a physics concept while allowing everyone to interact with each other in a shared experience. For all these reasons, I sincerely believe that VR will be an integral part of education by the year 2038.