Sinduja Ragunathan

“I am convinced that this is not going to be an extension of cinema or 3-D cinema or video games. It is something new, different, and not experienced yet. The strange thing here is that normally, in the history of culture, we have new stories and narrations and then we start to develop a tool. Or we have visions of wondrous new architecture — like, let’s say, the museum in Bilbao, or the opera house in Sydney — and technology makes it possible to fulfil these dreams. So you have the content first, and then the technology follows suit. In this case, we do have a technology, but we don’t have any clear idea how to fill it with content.”

Werner Herzog, German Film Director

It seems to me that increasingly we are in a place where we are offered more forms of technology, and we are quite not sure what we will fill it with. In this post, I will discuss virtual reality and its implications for education, particularly in the context of the Metaverse.

Hello, VR!

The term VR was first introduced in 1992 in the Neal Stephenson novel, Snow Crash. In this science fiction novel, there is an urban virtual reality environment where people interact through avatars using either goggles or from public booths. A far more popular, contemporary representation of VR came about in the movie Ready Player One.

Some Key Definitions

Virtual Reality – In VR, we have a fully immersive digital environment that takes the user to a completely simulated environment. Through VR headsets, we are transported to a computer-generated environment where we can interact with and explore a virtual world (Badilla et al., 2015).

Augmented Reality – In AR, digital elements are augmented or imposed over elements of the real world. Users can still see and interact with their physical surroundings, with virtual objects or information integrated into their view.

The Metaverse in Education

The Metaverse is a kind of multiverse of VR experiences. For example, you could go and have coffee with a friend in a virtual café, and then go and play a game, and then go for an office meeting in another VR setting, and so on. So it is an extensive world in itself with multiple players and purposes.

Each virtual world in the metaverse can be designed and managed independently of the others, giving us a vast variety of choices and options (Lee et al., 2021).

The COVID-19 pandemic brought a huge onslaught of interest and funding to research on remote learning technologies (Jandrić, 2023). The pandemic made us realize that merely transporting existing agents and resources to a digital medium doesn’t constitute e-learning (Pappas & Giannakos, 2021). It requires some rethinking in terms of design and objectives. It is here that technologies such as the Metaverse promise to fill a gap. (To be contd. in Part 2)