Adding to, and Creating Realities: the story of Virtual and Augmented Reality
Learning: the process of acquiring knowledge presented before you, in any format, for you to understand and carry out in your life. The process of learning has changed over the past two decades, from teachers reading text from the pages of a book, to having a student view content on presentations. As it should, technology has brought new gadgets into town, with one of them being the ability to view educative content in a three-dimensional setting.
Extended Reality has brought changes to the traditional classroom, by creating an environment that's both engaging and fun for a student to learn. It covers all sorts of immersive technology, including the widely used terms in this field, Augmented and Virtual Reality. This has helped teachers to raise interest and curiosity in the subjects they teach, by making sessions interactive and different. The process of a one-way learning has now come to and end; it's interactive learning that will carry forward the leap that education has taken.
A bit of both: Augmented and Virtual Reality, and what they mean
Do you remember playing Pokemon Go? That's what Augmented Reality is. This technology allows you to overlay animation on a real environment. It could be an animation of rubber ducks swimming in your bathtub, talking about the wonders of buoyancy, or puppets walking over your textbooks, giving you fun and interesting examples of the text printed on your book. What augmented reality aims to do is add more to the current reality you live in. The best part: it doesn't need any dedicated device for you to be able to use it.
Virtual Reality, is built around a virtual environment. Something that doesn't exist in the current reality you live in. To build such an application, a virtual setting must first be rendered. Since it doesn't add to where you're currently sitting, and instead transports you to "A Whole New World" (Disney fans, anyone?), it feels a lot more real as compared to its name. The only disadvantage is that it needs a dedicated VR headset to fully pull the magic it was built to deliver.
If you would like to know how these technologies will transform education, click here to find an earlier article I've written detailing the same.
Why should you use these technologies in a classroom?
Rather than reading a chapter from a book, it helps to visualize content. It helps students get a better understanding and insight about the topic. Since AR offers interactive experiences in a classroom, the level of enthusiasm always remains high during a classroom session. One of the most significant benefits of Augmented Reality in education is that it does not need any extra expenditure to fully create it. All that you need is a simple hand-held device that supports the application. As in the world-famous example of Pokemon Go, none of the Pokemon's you saw on our smartphone existed in the real world. What you had to do was install the application and run it, for you to become the best Pokmon Trainer. As I mentioned above, it adds to the environment you are in. There is no need to for you to spend extra money to buy related hardware if you're being held by a tight budget.
Virtual Reality has the power to change education as we know. Using VR headsets, students become wrapped in the world they dive into, utilizing knowledge gained during classroom hours in a space that they can call their own. Moreover, a 360-degree view of the virtual setting aims to completely immerse the student, thereby creating a lesson that's both an engaging and interactive. Also, this interaction helps students learn about a specific topic in depth and detail. When students find themselves involved in a virtual world, they cannot be distracted by anything that occurs in the real world. Thus, VR tackles the issue of concentration and focus of students.
What education needs,
Is the change that technology is bringing into our lives. Education is one of those divisions that feel the impact of innovation, and is important to transform traditional learning methods into guidelines that will change the industry forever. AR and VR are the latest trends slowly entering the classroom space. They have proven to be beneficial to both students and teachers, and have also proven to be useful tools to help students efficiently learn content in the most interesting way.
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