Fans of Second Life Hope to Bring VR Back to the Classroom

Active Worlds?

I did a Hangout a few weeks ago from Europe to a startup in TX. At least on my end I was on a 1Gbps fat academic ISP; can't speak for the other guy, but he was in his office. Still, voice and video quality was poor and we had to restart everything once.

Also have had many poor quality video conferences on Lync/Skype for Business where all participants have been on the same fat academic ISP.

I know this is anecdote and a single data point, but I find it interesting nonetheless.

My mom, 60+ year old, decided she wanted to learn proper English. Being an aircraft controller, she already knew enough to get by on the job (communication is pretty much standardized). But nowhere near enough to get by in the US.

After a few conventional approaches (such as physical English classes), she somehow found out about Second Life and enrolled in a (paid!) course.

Fast forward a couple of years. She can now hold conversations in English and go out by herself without a family member translating. As an observer, the progress was outstanding.

One thing that I have noticed is that it can be way more interactive than "normal" classes. For instance, there was a lesson that took place at an airport. So, instead of just an opening dialog in a book, and then some discussion, their avatars were at a functioning airport. So they could go all the way from arriving at the airport to boarding the plane, having dialogue all the way. Not sure if the airplane did or could take off though.

At another one that I witnessed, they were at a clothing store. So they could actually interact with a human shopkeeper, buy the article of clothing they wanted, then put on their avatar.

Having attended "standard" classes all my life, I was blown away by how much the virtual environment would foster dialogue. Usually, a teacher has a hard time coaxing this kind of interaction in a classroom setting.

Also of importance is that, since you are hidden behind an avatar, shy people seem more comfortable. Things such as race and, to an extent, age, are completely hidden.

Not sure if VR would help anything, except for the "cool" factor, which can't be discounted.

I think this is the underlying cause for many of the failed projects from the 'Second Life bubble'. Many human activities, especially those related to information intake and processing have a long history of being 2D. From clay tablets to paper books, from the first photograph to 4K television, virtually all of the information designed for human consumption has been 2D. Only an incredibly small percentage is in 3D and even less is designed to be consumed in 3D (e.g. video games are often 3D internally but are designed for 2D consumption). This might or might not change in the future but if it does it will be changing neither soon nor rapidly.

Yes, one can use 2D interfaces inside 3D worlds but any 3D system short of the matrix will have a noticeable quality degradation (e.g. visual fidelity, haptic feedback, fatigue, etc) compared to directly using a 2D interface in real life. A few edge cases might become feasible much sooner, e.g. using VR to emulate large screens but that's hardly 'Virtual Reality'. Until we come up with meaningful ways to represent more kinds of information in 3D and/or create a matrix-style experience, VR will most likely be limited to applications that are inherently 3D.

This obviously includes entertainment (VR games, 'movies', 3D art) and CAD/CAM/3D modelling which are already very much 3D in nature and internal representation, even if they are currently usually projected onto 2D screens. Outside of that, the main 'educational' usage currently consists of building 3D environments (labs, buildings, factories, complex machinery) that emulate real-life environments in order to familiarize trainees with the workflows in those places. This can be surprisingly effective, especially considering how much cheaper VR mockups are compared to e.g. NASA's real-life 1:1 ISS training replica.

These applications are worthwhile in their own right and they will probably be able to sustain a decent market for VR hardware and development. However, I'm personally much more interested in seeing what kind of concepts that aren't already inherently 3D can be enhanced or revolutionized by adding another dimension.

The ability to cheaply simulate environments is at the core of many VR education/training concepts. I hadn't heard of it being applied to language education, that's really interesting!

Second Life specifically excels at being a platform for roleplaying (in the educational sense as well as the D&D sense). The built-in creation tools allow people to very quickly create environments that have enough fidelity to be a significant step up from 'this table is now an airplane' and thanks to the marketplace one can often quickly and cheaply acquire ready-made props for virtually any scenario. Using the more advanced creation tools one can even create video-game-level fidelity however that is usually not necessary for educational environments.