Once a month, Imagine Moody comes together in the Imagine Lab to host the Moody MeetUp, a conversation designed to engage UT students and faculty with topics around how certain industries are changing thanks to emerging technology. With the advent of improved virtual and augmented reality, and this past September we chose to discuss how these platforms have influenced and accommodated today’s classrooms, and to think about how these new horizons may change the systems we are all most familiar with.

When it comes to education, it is one of the most constant features for at least a quarter of our lives. We spend at least 7 years learning how to survive, then another 5 learning to add and subtract (in many more ways than one), then a couple of years or decades more learning how the world we live in works — a journey that honestly never really ends. This is the space that VR/AR has the most potential in, being that classroom technology and approaches to learning have not truly changed due to realistic boundaries. These boundaries, including space, time, and scale, are limited to the physical classroom. Students can read about how trees grow, how the planets are aligned, or how equations and physics apply on diagrammatic images inside a textbook — however, in a virtual classroom, these subjects can be experienced firsthand.

Thinking about virtual and augmented reality’s core features, the obvious element that applies to the education industry is its inherent digital un-limitless. Students would not have to wait years to witness a sapling turning into a tree, or even have to wait or travel anywhere, thanks to the digital freedom of computer imaging. As part of the MeetUps, we organize demos from existing applications and experiences among a variety of platforms to exposé how education has the potential to be a useful tool in how we learn in the future. Each demo is also an example of a style of learning in which virtual and augmented reality have considerable influence to introduce or alter completely.

What we now know to be true, especially with VR and AR, is that the future of our lives will be wireless. The ability to take these experiences anywhere, granted some may require internet, would be the primary mode in which these immersive technologies have the greatest advantage over traditional learning. To an extent, this is already possible with our smartphones, LTE internet, and the ever-present search engine, and knowledge therefore has never been more available. However human interaction is still often missing from these new, yet traditional, ways of learning. Learning is often individually managed and sought out, and more traditionally in a physical border such as a classroom. With VR/AR, this may change, in that collaborative learning is introduced in the next classroom of a virtual space, or even lack thereof a space. The experiences demoed for this topic included Altspace VR and the Makey Makey.

Most students, especially those in STEAM related fields, are also encouraged in the traditional classroom technique to be more hands on and constructivist in their learning. For the most part, this would continue to be the case as students transition to college and real world industry, so the use of VR and AR in this aspect would prove to be useful in the way students can manipulate, test, develop, and engage their topics without risk or boundaries. The experiences demoed for this topic included the Mergecube and the VR game Fantastic Contraption.

Even today, field trips are considered the standard for most school related activities outside of the classroom. With VR/AR, one of the first applications developed were for travel, and with education, this may be applied to situated learning especially. Students would no longer have to spend their savings on study abroad courses or be concerned about the physical limitations of traveling when it comes to the learning experience. Simply plop on a headset, and a student may be in ancient Athens, on the Titanic, or learning one-on-one with a tour guide across the world. Also, VR/AR provide unique lens to see and analyze the world.

Instead of waiting for a perfect clear night, students can now hold up their iPhone to the sky to see the present constellations hidden in plain sight, or point their phone down at the earth to analyze the replication of a Velociraptor skeleton in real-world scale. While some aspects of physical travel may never be able to be fully replicated, this aspect of virtual learning has already proven useful to those with the physical or economic inability to access similar experiences or even to mimic the exhibitions found in a museum. The experiences demoed for this topic included Unimersiv, the iOS app Star Walk, and the MagicLeap educational app Dinosaur Kit.

Lastly, a more obvious means of education has always been creativity. From a young age we encourage students to think differently, use a variety of materials at their disposal, and even work independently to understand concepts of art, physics, and culture. The virtual realms experienced via a headset or smartphone enable a student to gauge creativity with refreshed perspectives, with the ability to alter space and time, and essentially use whatever tools they can think of to create something unique. No longer are multiple tools needed for a single medium. No easel, paint brush, or canvas is necessary, but instead a student may use their virtual space to mold and design whatever their imagination desires. They can also animate their creations in real-time, and move around their artwork through unique dimensions that otherwise would be impossible with real world physical boundaries. The experiences demoed for this topic included Oculus Medium and Mindshow VR.

Virtual and augmented reality have the potential to push the boundaries of collaborative, constructivist, situated, and experiential learning, and with the advent of more accessible technology, the experiences available already may be coming to the classroom sooner than we expected. It might be a stretch, but it is entirely possible that the classroom may not be physically necessary down the line, as the limitations of reality may inhibit the creative solutions we may need in the future, solutions that can be experienced in the virtual world.

Imagine Education with VR/AR was originally published in AR/VR Journey: Augmented & Virtual Reality Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.