Lesson 12 - Emerging Technologies

3.5. Strengths and Weaknesses

VR is not just a fad that will disappear. There are already a large number of commercial applications, mainly in entertainment and public relations, but also increasingly for specific areas of education and training. There is already a lot of excellent, off-the-shelf software for creating VR environments, and the cost of hardware is dropping rapidly (although good quality headsets and other equipment are still probably too expensive for required use by large numbers of students).

The fields of application of this technology are unlimited: training in the use of complex equipment, simulation of surgical procedures, architectural design testing, the reconstruction of sites in archeology, virtual museum visits, treatment of pain and phobias, and many other possibilities.

To enable the more emotional aspects of decision making to be handled, the immersive experience needs to be realistic. This will probably require high-quality media production. Thus VR may often need to be combined with simulation design, quality media production, and powerful computing to be educationally effective, again pushing up the cost. For these reasons, medicine is a particularly likely area for development, where traditional training costs are really high or where training is difficult to provide with real patients.

Once again, though, applications will tend to be very specific to the needs of a particular subject area. This means designers must include subject specialists with a deep understanding of the field who can combine the power of the technology with the needs of learners in a particular learning context. VR in particular requires instructors with imagination and creativity, working with other professionals such as media producers, learners themselves, as well as specialists in VR design.

What has inhibited widespread educational use of earlier two-dimensional VR developments such as Second Life has been the high cost and difficulty of creating the graphics and contexts for learning. Thus even if the hardware and software costs for VR are low enough for individual student use, the high production costs of creating realistic educational contexts and scenarios are likely to inhibit its general use.

Some caution is also needed in assuming that people will behave the same in real life as they do in VR environments. Gallup et al. (2019) found a major difference in the influence of social factors within real-world and virtual environments: social cues in actual reality appear to dominate and supersede those in VR. One of the authors, Alan Kingstone, concluded:

“Using VR to examine how people think and behave in real life may very well lead to conclusions that are fundamentally wrong. This has profound implications for people who hope to use VR to make accurate projections regarding future behaviors. For example, predicting how pedestrians will behave when walking amongst driverless cars, or the decisions that pilots will make in an emergency situation. Experiences in VR may be a poor proxy for real life.”

Rolfsen, 2019

This means we need more experimentation. This is still a relatively new technology, and there may be very simple ways to use it in education that are not costly and meet needs that cannot be easily met in traditional teaching or with other existing technology. For this to happen, though, educators, software developers, and media producers need to come together to play, experiment, test, and evaluate.

Nevertheless, VR and AR are exciting technologies with the potential to change radically conventional learning processes.