Oculus Rift in the classroom: Immersive education’s next level
Aaron E. Walsh, director of the Immersive Education Initiative, a 7,000-member non-profit consortium of colleges, universities and companies developing standards and best practices for virtual reality-based learning, says though the first virtual reality headsets came about in the 1990s, “[for] every one of these immersive technologies, it takes decades of refinement and enhancement before it gets to a point where it’s actually viable.” He believes the arrival of the Oculus Rift and Sony Morpheus, both expected to be priced at a few hundred dollars, signal the crossing of that threshold for headsets. Over time, they could be more cost-effective, than, say, field trips.
Because Kansas City is one of the cities to enjoy Google Fiber’s 1 Gigabit-per-second Internet service, the library project is meant to showcase the capabilities of Internet that’s 100 times faster than average broadband. It uses the combination of Oculus Rift and Minecraft (unofficially dubbed Minecrift) to allow the students to re-imagine their neighborhoods. The idea for the project came out of a discussion between Marcus Brown, the digital youth engagement associate, and a student who was wondering why his neighborhood didn’t have the sort of upscale restaurants or shopping he saw in other areas of town.
But ultimately, how well educators are able to take advantage of virtual environments remains to be seen. “I could imagine a dystopian world in which only the rich kids go on field trips, whereas the have-nots are forced to view things in virtual environments,” says Ratan. On the other hand, he can envision a utopian world in which virtual field trips make education more accessible to everyone. As technology advances and the obstacles of bandwidth and price fall away, we’ll see what happens next.
See the full story here: http://www.zdnet.com/oculus-rift-in-the-classroom-immersive-educations-next-level-7000034099/