REDISCOVER
VIRTUAL REALITY
FOR EDUCATION
Future forwarding learning and research in your institution
In today’s fast-paced world, engineering and information technology is advancing at a breakneck speed. Technical education needs to be supplemented and in certain areas, driven by these technologies. The knowledge of a graduate engineer is now tagged with a half-life. With the rise in the pace of transition to obsolete knowledge, ‘obsoledge’ as Alvin Toffler puts it, technical education particularly faces the heat. Educators in this space, face the following challenges.
- Keeping pace with the technological advancements
- Effectively leveraging them by developing pedagogical strategies and instructional materials centered around them and
- Generating quality research. This creates the requirement for a high technology setup steeped right into the future, that doubles up as:
- A progressive learning center loaded with curriculum related content
- A high fidelity research cum collaboration center.
For educational purposes, Virtual Reality (VR) has been proposed as a technological breakthrough that holds the power to facilitate better learning. VR applications are based on the growing certainty that the next evolutionary stage is computers and telecommunications fusing into virtual environments. VR holds the promise of single handedly augmenting the existing curriculum and stimulating further research.
While traditional notions of education, stimulating only one human sense, have been primarily intellectual, the unified hear-see-do experience facilitated by VR
can be used to support complex understanding by stimulating and
exploring all human senses. The versatility of a VR setup lies in the fact that it is truly multidisciplinary in nature and can be used across departments. With our proven expertise in setting up VR centers, prepare to get immersed in our VizCenter and rediscover education in your spheres of interest…
VIZCENTER®
Virtual Reality for Education
“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand”
Confucius
2500 years ago
“About time we hear-see-do at the same time and understand it all better”
Learning by simultaneous hearing, seeing and doing
Virtual Reality (VR) can be best defined as a form of visual human computer interface, characterized by an environmental simulation controlled by the user. Superior to text-based and desktop VR, immersive VR involves a combination of visual computing hardware and software along with data, that allows the user to interact with a three dimensional computer generated world using VR gadgets. VR goes beyond simulations, i.e., virtual worlds can embody arbitrary objects, abstract or concrete, and can be programmed to behave in ways that have no equivalence in the real world. VR is considered a great enabler in education.
The constructivist theory of education proposes that the focus of education should be less on competition and more on collaboration. This is a matter of even greater significance now, as quality research, which has always been a collaborative effort, is the primary metric on which universities all over the world are being evaluated on. It is obligatory for universities of today and tomorrow to be focussed towards research than anything else. A VR environment that is setup to supplement the existing curriculum and simultaneously drive further research can essentially make this a reality. To allow educational tools to fall behind the pace of technological advancements would mean failing to tap the potential of a whole new generation of eager young minds.
The technological constructs that support this
argument are:
- Gordon Moore’s eponymous law concerning the exponential rise in the computational power of the integrated chip and the decrease in size and cost of these devices simultaneously.
- The Pixels per dollar construct which has facilitated setting up highly sophisticated visual computing systems at a much lower cost.
These two factors can be leveraged in a
substantial manner in the field of education, by setting up immersive virtual reality centers that would be multidisciplinary in usage.
VR has immense potential as a medium of
education, specifically in the visualization of abstract concepts, in a much larger than life scale with options that allow better mastering and retaining of that knowledge. Further virtual labs that can be setup using VR can facilitate research at a fraction of the
cost involved in setting up physical labs while
enabling greater experimentation. Research has shown that various aspects of a virtual reality environment, affect education on three metrics.
- Immersion
- Interaction
- Engagement
These three factors need to be seriously
considered while setting up a VR center in universities
to ensure maximum effectiveness on learning.