What’s new in educational VR? Not that much in the classroom practical sense. Unless your school has an insane budget there’s still no way for a group of students to experience VR the way it’s meant to be. For parents with the means, a VR headset and computer can provide...
VR: Why it's important Trying to explain VR is a bit like trying to describe the taste of food- it has to be experienced. Since we know that people learn best from experiences, it follows that experiences in VR can be very educational. How that ends up happening may...
Here is a Google Slides version of the presentation, I've prepared, hope it goes well!
Allumette is a serious work of art that is interesting to watch several times, because you can see so many different things. The Hans Christian Anderson adaptation is kind of a bummer, so it's remarkable that Director Eugene Chung is able to make it magic and breathtaking anyway.
VR is going to also cause a revolution in news reporting. The empathy machine allows you to be immersed in a way that other media cannot replicate. There is a new language of film for VR being developed rapidly. The viewer is quite vulnerable in the filmmakers vision of the...
These kind of primitive VR educational apps show the promise of how these tools may be able to make learning easier in some ways. There will not be a "free ride" where learning is automatically fun, but there's no question that students will have different perspectives, insights and skills when they...
Of course you would, even if it included lectures in between the sites.
VR ideas like this one could help people understand the experiences of others, it's up to us to create or negotiate for the content to fuel this "empathy machine".
Astronomy and space are obviously great topics- if not the best- for VR. Here are some of the things available now, from Star Chart, to Titans of Space, to a tutorial about the ISS, and finally a challenging game that reminds you of the movie Gravity. Another great game I'll...
Another dream of mankind is to imitate the grace of birds who have learned how to travel in the atmosphere. It looks like so much fun to us until we think about long migrations and competition for nest space and the competitive reality of the environment that shapes natural selection....
Many if not all of us love the ocean and wish we could spend more time looking at it or even looking IN it. We need to build more awareness of the ocean on the level of ecosystems, climate, resources, the relationship of the ocean to everything really. A problem...
Not too many students would complain today if their consequences for misbehaving or being lazy meant after school detention in virtual reality. The Story of Colonist A-514 goes like this: "As a teenager in the middle generation of a 140 year expedition to re-colonize mankind, you have no experience of...
There are many more space travel and astronomy type experiences and games in VR but next I want to show one of the "inner space" experiences that gives a sense of what is possible in VR. A challenge educators will face is how to craft the content so that it...
Back in April of last year I wrote up this proposal blurb for NSTA's (National Science Teachers Association) annual convention in Los Angeles this year. "Scientists and science teachers use models daily in pursuit of understanding the natural world. The next major communications platform is likely to be virtual reality, and science...