I think the real revolution in teaching will be when we have enough well educated, well paid teachers. Imagine the level of immersion that could be accomplished with real-time individualized lessons!

In addition, because VR makes project-based learning [0] more scalable, a teacher's time can be used more efficiently.

These cost-savings can be passed on to the students and the teachers (in the form of higher salaries). All this while improving average the education quality.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project-based_learning

A big problem with education in my opinion is that everyone who has been to school sees themselves as a teaching expert. The near-minimum-wage teacher who buy school supplies out of their own pockets, they are the experts. Rant over.

I think VR might help to some subjects, but having an all-VR experience seems an awful thing to me...

I'll note that TV was seen as the future of education for quite a while. And that videoconferencing has been the future of interaction since the early 1980s. The first never worked out. And although the jury's still out on the latter, it's undeniable that a) it's not as good, and b) it's taken a very long time for the technology to be reasonably useful.

Historically, people seem to confuse "we don't know what X can't do" with "there's nothing X can't do". Technoutopianism can be useful, in that optimistic people will try things out and discover where the limits are. The current wave of VR is interesting, but it's perfectly possible that it will end up in the same place as 1990s VR: a historically interesting wave of hype that turned out not to deliver much value that couldn't be gotten more easily with other approaches.

It's just more exciting to me to envision a future where VR will work out, and I will keep working on it under that assumption.

A classic example here is Apple. They did not make the first personal computer, the first MP3 player, or the first smartphone. Those were made by people focused on the tech. Instead, Apple took mostly-existing tech and really focused on delivering value to users.

I think a user-first attitude is important even when making consumer gadgets. But a student-first focus is vital for education. There are a zillion examples of educational tools and methods inflicted upon kids not because they were better for students, but because somebody wanted to prove something.

I'm sure the engineers at Apple also looked at the tech and were like "holy shit, this enables us to do crazy stuff".

But in practice, nobody has demonstrated that those new things deliver more value. Again, consider 90s VR. Or how people were sure that home computers were the coming thing starting in 1970 (and probably earlier). But they didn't really become particularly useful or common until the arrival of the web browser. [1]

The engineers at jetpack and flying car and humaniform robot companies also said "Holy shit, imagine what we can do." We could look at the plans for manned space travel of 1940-1980, none of which panned out. Heck, we could look at 3D movies and TV, which have flopped repeatedly. And even at Apple there were plenty of times that they said that and were wrong. [2]

I'm really not trying to rain on your parade here. I'm happy to admit that this could really be the time VR takes off. But I'd love it if more VR proponents could accept that "feels like magic" is a novelty effect; that the history of 3D "feels like magic" products turning into giant flops goes back at least 150 years; and that this could be just another one of those things that ends up like 3D TV or Smellovision.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_computer#Reception_and_so...

[2] https://blog.musicmagpie.co.uk/2017/09/06/7-apple-products-t...

Why not?

> You don't only need information, you also need interactions, real life interaction

What is reality?

Education is a class separator. What matters is relative education, not absolute.

Also, it doesn't matter how good books are at teaching kids to solve integrals if 90% of them won't even give the book a chance, but can't wait to get on their headsets.

Please try this and come back with a fresh perspective.

Then our GIS department bought one and I’ve tried it a few times now. I always feel constrained when I go back to my two monitors.

The interface and technology in general has some way to go, but I think VR will be the biggest tech revolution in my lifetime and I’ve been around since before the refrigerator was a common thing.

my mom was a teacher, and i clearly remember the required use of powerpoint to be a major detriment to her teaching. as another example, i was horrified recently during a volunteer opportunity at a local high school at the use of chromebooks in the classroom. it seemed like such a blind use that served no purpose other than to further seaparate the students and teachers from social interaction and communication.

i think something like dynamicland is the only technology that has promise to be used as an educational tool.

One thing I can see this being used for is fork lift driver training. You could put the person in the seat of the heavy and expensive equipment without actually risking anything. The user can play around with the controls and make mistakes without the fear of breaking something. That alone would be valuable.

on a side note, it also took my interest to new levels because the 3d animations revealed to me just how mechanical our body is, with a hierarchy of components very much like an integrated circuit.

so I can only imagine what it will be like to conduct labs or teach students using a 3d VR environment. It has a unique edge that not even the best teacher on earth can do-trick its users into believe they are not in lecture, but in a video game like world but with higher productivity.

It might also be great for teaching science, since VR can communicate scale much better than drawings.

https://savkar.math.uconn.edu/calculus-3-visuals/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T647CGsuOVU https://www.reddit.com/r/visualizedmath/top/

At my high school somebody asked the calculus teacher why he was the calculus teacher and not another teacher. "We drew straws and I lost so I went to the training".

I played with VR a few years ago, and found the notion of an immersive virtual environment to be profoundly different from looking at something on a computer screen.

Some technology absolutely helps with learning. Pencils and paper are technology that help us write down our thoughts. School buildings and chalkboards are technology that make it easy for us to meet and collaborate.

Computers too can provide an opportunity for us to play with abstract concepts. Immersive VR could be a way to better understand certain concepts. With the right presentation, I think VR could be a more effective way of learning than other methods.

I would totally pay $60 for a VR game that has you building a house from the ground up or doing woodworking in as much detail as possible (even if it's individual stages and tasks without a proper physics sandbox).

This implies having children using these headsets for extended periods of time. I hope the (auto?) calibration of future headsets gets real good, otherwise I fear there are some risks, messing with the eyesight of children.

Potentially awesome, sure. Just, not too fast.

I'll note that "3D is the future of education!" has a long history. Stereoscopic photos were the future starting in the 1850s. During WWII, the US Department of Defense bought 100,000 View-Masters and millions of reels because 3D content was more effective and engaging for training. But somehow those futures never happened. This one could well end up in the same historical category.

Magic Leap just released their first dev kit last month. StarVR has a new HMD coming out with 210 degree FOV. Oculus is working on a standalone wireless HMD. Things are actually progressing much quicker than anyone thought back in 2014 when the "VR renaissance" got started. We now have wireless HMDs, eye tracking with foveated rendering, perfect sub-millimeter inside-out camera based tracking, and the first multi-plane displays (on Magic Leap One).

None of that tech even existed 4 years ago, or if it did it was in a university research lab. We're now less than 5 years away from having a slim, lightweight, wireless device that you can put on your face and have 100% nonstop presence. There are still things to solve like haptics and locomotion which will be decades away, but the visual component is totally solvable with current tech.