Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Education Driven By Virtual Reality Looks To Have A Promising Future After Immersive VR Education Releases The Apollo 11 Virtual Reality Experience

As the tidal wave of Virtual Reality (VR) continues to rise, David Whelan and his team at Immersive VR Education have presented a proof of concept for a VR-driven educational system that could revolutionize the current system in place today. The proof of concept comes in a product called The Apollo 11 Virtual Reality Experience, an immersive experience that puts the user in the shoes of an astronaut of the Apollo 11 mission that landed the first humans on the Moon. A demo of the project can be viewed here.
The project's Kickstarter shows a view of where you sit
Virtual Reality is an immersive medium with the goal of providing the user with an experience that feels as close to reality as is possible. Modern day virtual reality is typically experienced through the use of a head-mounted display (HMD), which affixes two monitors (one for each eye) onto a user’s head. While the idea has been considered for centuries, only recently have our computational capab-
ilities reached the point where it is possible to mass produce a Virtual Reality helmet with suitable functionality. The most popular branch of this technology has thus far been video game development, but some developers, such as Whelan, see a possibility for this technology to enter the field of education. As can be seen in the chart to the right, when a group of respondents were asked whether they would prefer to learn about historical events in a VR-driven immersive experience over traditional methods, more than 60% of the respondents said they would. Additionally, three interviewed students said that they were interested in experiencing Virtual Reality. So clearly there is an audience for a product that achieves this. This is where the Apollo 11 project comes in. The project requested €30,000 from kickstarter and ended up successfully raising €36,623 thus far.


The exciting potential of VR-driven education comes largely from the increased information retention that can result from the heightened experience. Intuitively, as the level of interactivity of a medium increases, so should the user’s retention of his/her experience with the medium. Think about how you can remember all of the lines to your favorite movie but can’t remember something you read in your textbook the night before. This idea was demonstrated in a 2007 study funded by Brunel University in London, which presented a sample of 33 undergraduates with the task of operating a bicycle pump. The sample was randomly divided into two groups where one group learned with an interactive learning system, while the other learned with a non-interactive learning system that involved both images and text. The study concluded that the students who used the interactive system outperformed those who used the non-interactive system.


Interactivity is defined by Media and Internet scholar Sheizaf Rafaeli to be “the condition of communication in which simultaneous and continuous exchanges occur” (Pavlik/McIntosh, 160). Converging Media: A New Introduction To Mass Communication, generalizes this as, “[T]wo or more parties communicating through an ongoing give and take of messages” (Pavlik/McIntosh, 160). Video games are a popular example of an interactive medium in which users interact with the medium in order to influence an outcome and vice versa. Virtual Reality combines the audio-visual elements of a movie, and then has the added interactivity of spatial perception. Through head-movement tracking, the user has the ability to look around and focus on whatever he/she desires, which means a constantly flowing give and take of messages between the user and the medium. This results in a level of interactivity that far surpasses that of other modern mediums such as movies and textbooks.

The future of VR-driven education is limitless. The Kickstarter for The Apollo 11 Virtual Reality Experience states, “We don’t just want kids to read about history, we want them to experience history as a living entity that they can relate to.” Imagine if instead of just hearing about Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, you were actually able to sit in the crowd and watch it take place. Imagine not just hearing about the emotions that were felt during an event, but actually being able to feel the emotions themselves. This is what is hoped for by the Apollo 11 project, and by the VR-driven education concept in general.

There are plenty of possibilities outside the realm of history, too. Physics teachers can use this to show students simulations that would be impossible in the classroom, such as a simulation of gravity manipulation. Biology students could take a trip through a virtual human body and get close-up, realistic representations of concepts that they are learning. While the Apollo project is currently a one-user experience, it can be imagined that down the line there will be full-classroom experiences where everybody in a class can be in one virtual world, together. This could allow the teacher to still be present in the experience, directing students on where to go and what to pay attention to.

As time goes by, the educational system will have to adapt to changing technology in order to remain relevant. Virtual Reality has presented itself as the possible next step in educational technology by providing a fully-immersive experience for students to utilize in order to learn about concepts and historical events. David Whelan and his team at Immersive VR Education are currently demonstrating this idea with The Apollo 11 Virtual Reality Experience. With widespread acclaim, this project provides a framework for what looks to be a revolutionary advancement in the educational model.

If you own an Oculus Rift DK2 and would like to experience the project, download it here.

If you do not own an Oculus Rift and this has inspired you to get one, they are available for order from their website.

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