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.

Interactive Visualization: Your Daily Dose Of Water

Infographic: http://awesome.good.is/transparency/web/1204/your-daily-dose-of-water/flash.html

I think this is a very good interactive infographic in certain ways but it can definitely use improvement. The design of the infographic is very nice and is easy to read. From the start, the title, Your Daily Dose Of Water, is explanatory in the sense that it explains that we will learn about how much water we use in a day, but it would be better if it explained what metric we will be using. The rest of the infographic requires the user to click a variety of buttons in order to fill a bar representing gallons of water used. While this method does force the user to see each individual gallon amount, and nicely separates the activities by time of day, the fact that it requires so much time and effort to work through it is a downside of the infographic, since users nowadays tend to spend a small amount of time on each webpage. If an infographic takes too long to use, such as this one, it may encourage users to leave the infographic early, and they won’t learn all the information the graphic is trying to convey. Overall, the infographic is well-designed and relatively simple to use, but can use some tweaks to improve its attractiveness to users.

Video Games Have Less of an Effect on Media Users Than Television, but Neither Effect is Significant Enough to Warrant Concern

The massive question of how the media affects the viewer has spawned not just decades of debate but has also inspired research into answering related, more specific questions. One of these is whether the increased interactivity of playing a video game causes it to have an increased effect on the consumer than the more passive activity of watching television. A study done at Purdue University by Cognitive Science professor John L. Sherry concluded that not only do video games actually have less of an effect on consumers than television, but the effect itself is small. This implies that the level of interactivity involved in a specific form of media does not necessarily correlate to an increase in the effect that media has on the consumer. But, why is this the case?

The reason for this likely has to do with cultivation theory, a media theory developed by George Gerbner and Larry Gross at the University of Pennsylvania, which states that watching television instills in the watcher a view of reality similar to the world displayed on the screen. This makes sense for television because a majority of the content involves human actors and realistic portrayals of real life events. Some TV shows even involve filmed events that happen in reality, many shows being about exhilarating / shocking moments caught on film. The difference with video games is that a majority of games are so fantastical that people understand how to disconnect between the game and reality. Essentially, a consumer is more likely to associate an episode of, say, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation with the workings of the real world than a consumer is likely to consider the Grand Theft Auto game series to be a realistic portrayal of everyday life. No matter how much interaction playing Grand Theft Auto may take, the universe within the game makes it quite obvious that it is an unrealistic parody of the real world. CSI, on the other hand, attempts to realistically replicate how real life investigations occur. Even further along the realism spectrum is Cops, a show which films the activities of real life police officers. While the show does show crime being punished, which seems like it should be a good thing, many watch the show simply for the thrill of seeing violent or potentially-violent situations.

That being said, this means the difference in effect between video games and television is primarily based off their differing capabilities of portraying realistic imagery. While at the moment the graphical quality between television and video games is quite literally the difference between reality and fantasy, the gap between the two has rapidly been closing. With technology rising at an exponential rate, and computing power following the same path, video game graphics are becoming increasingly realistic. With better and better graphics, the effects of cultivation theory could very well become apparent in video games. To top it all off, games are now experimenting with virtual reality technology to make a much more realistic, immersive experience. This may bring cultivation theory to a whole new level in video games, possibly making it even more apparent in games than in television. For now, the effect of modern virtual reality gaming on human development remains an untapped area for research. However, with all the talk around video game violence, it seems apparent that there will definitely be research into the medium once it becomes mass produced and consumed.

But, is this really something we should be worried about? The Purdue study seems to suggest not, as do other studies after it. Around a decade after the Purdue study, four researchers sought out to answer the same big question. Their study attempted to control other variables in order to purely focus on the effects of watching television and playing video games, keeping anything that may muddle up the results under control. The results showed that, assuming the consumption of television and/or video games was not excessive, the “magnitude of the effect is small enough to be negligible” (Nakamuro, 2). The assumption that consumption not be excessive does bring up the question of how to define “excessive”, and whether excessive usage should be controlled. But, since an excessive consumption of essentially anything can potentially be dangerous, this assumption is generally fair.

How does the media affect the viewer? This is one the most hotly debated psychological questions to arise since the development of mass media. There is no doubt that peoples’ interactions with their surrounding environments, including their media consumption, influences their behavior and development. However, this question does not seek a simple confirmation of effect, rather this question seeks the answer to more complicated questions. How do movies specifically affect viewers? Does the interactivity of playing a video game make it a stronger influence on viewers than the more passive action of watching television? For now, the effect seems to be small enough such that it can be ignored. However, as technology continues to develop and new mediums are developed, more and more questions will appear, and future questions may come with more complicated implications. But if anything is certain, it’s that this debate will be continuing on for a long time.

Where It Starts

Hello, I'm Yuval. I'm a junior at the University of Maryland majoring in Computer Science.

I'm from Long Island, New York. My interests include programming and writing/playing music.

I'm really interested in learning about modern, innovative technology, and am excited to learn a lot about it from J150.