VR in Education

It's interesting that this showed up today

I'd just paused a couple of days as I was really excited about the potential mixed reality, VR & AR have for education. I typed out a bunch of my thoughts, and then thought maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, and should think about it for a while.

So, I thought about language learning. I taught English in Japan for a year. I tried to learn Japanese while I was there. I learned some. I can get around, but I'm not fluent by any stretch of the imagination.

So, I put myself back in Japan. With a pair of glasses. The glasses are connected to a scanner that scans my surroundings. I can set the glasses in various ways: It can scan the area, and each thing the glasses recognize, it can label. There's a car. The glasses highlight the car, show me the character for "car" and I hear it pronounced in my ears. It doesn't intrude on anyone else. 

Anything else I see -- it gets labeled. It can quiz me. when It highlights the car and with no delay I call it out.... it doesn't highlight it anymore... then more and better and better.... without having to sit down and force attention, without memorization, without drills... fluency could be achieved at enormously accelerated levels.

Children who learn the language and everything else the best are those kids whose parents talk to them. They're seeing things and having them labeled, learning little bits -- and learning it constantly.

It can work the same for teaching skills mechanics, technicians, surgeons, and pilots. (What's next... the glasses can highlight the surroundings, and prompt at the right time.)

Imagine learning history, by having it created in front of you, or with something like google street view in History. (Victorian London in Pictures) 

Or, check out the last 8 years in London on Schrewsbury Road use the clock on the street view map, upper left.
(London Street Scene, Google Maps, with History view.)

MVIS will be everywhere.

Thanks to the French Investor.


Virtual Reality Training

Virtual reality hasn't quite changed the world the way we were promised, but that doesn't mean its effects aren't profound. In recent years, VR has even made positive impacts in a somewhat surprising place: the restaurant industry. 

In the midst of high turnover, cook shortages and rising minimum wages, VR training companies have positioned the technology as a potential remedy for many of the issues the industry faces today: more accessible and in-depth training, improved employee retention, targeted advancement of high-performing employees, and, through that, better margins and long-term sustainability. 

Oculus Rooms and Parties

I don't know if this is what was intended when Oculus was purchased by Facebook, but it does look interesting, and will probably have some popularity.

Augmented is going to be more popular, because it won't replace your surroundings and isolate you from the people you're with.

UploadVR -- More at the source

Rooms and Parties are significant steps for the Oculus ecosystem for a few key reasons. The first is that they finally put your friends list to better use. Since launch, the Oculus Home friends list has been evolving toward usefulness. Oculus Rift owners have been giving their buddy list a workout with the addition of more and more multiplayer games, but these two new social experiences are some of the biggest use cases yet for your friends on Gear VR.

It also seems that Oculus and Facebook are in an active state of iteration with their social platforms. Oculus Social released with a few things to do (trivia, social theaters, etc.) but that platform has largely stagnated since release. The feature overlap with Oculus Social and Oculus Rooms leads one to believe that Rooms is the new poster child for pure social interaction on the Oculus platform.

Parties is also the first time Oculus and Facebook are allowing their customers to user a VR platform as a general communications tool. Third party creators like AltspaceVR have been doing this for a while now, but this is the first time that the folks in Menlo Park are taking a similar approach.

How well known is the market?

This is about how many people are aware of Virtual Reality. (Sony Gear VR - Oculus Rift, Google Cardboard) All the attention these things have gotten in various media -- including Sony's advertising, and most people don't know about it.

Even fewer know about Augmented reality. 

Eventually people will figure it out. NDAs are out there so that it's a surprise that results in a frenzy of buying someday soon.

Maybe they need to talk to whoever is writing and producing ads for Micromax.


Power Gaming UK

Despite 2016 seeing virtual reality break into the mainstream market, headset manufacturers such as Sony, Oculus and HTC still have a lot of work to do in order to educate the masses, according to a new study.

In the Consumer Strategies and Use Cases for Virtual and Augmented Reality white paper, released by market research firm Parks Associates, research found that 63 percent of all Americans were unfamiliar or knew nothing whatsoever about virtual reality.

Seattle Leading the Way in VR and Augmented Reality Development

Microvision in the right place with the right product.

Note the highlight at the bottom. The development of these systems is very difficult, and there is a lot of work involved in making it work right. 


GeekWire  (More at the source)

The region’s legacy as a gaming hub with the presence of Xbox, Nintendo, Valve, Bungie and others, makes for an easy transition into VR/AR, which in many ways is the next evolution of video games. Many of the most well-known headsets are made by companies based in the Seattle area or with offices here, such as Microsoft and the HoloLens, Facebook and Oculus Rift and Valve/HTC and the Vive.

“Because of our deep talent pool in video game development, the Puget sound region has become a center of Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Realty development” said Kristina Hudson, executive director of WIN. “This is still a very young sub-cluster of the industry. Quite a lot of investment dollars are flowing to virtual, augmented and mixed reality development, and our game developers are moving in the space.”

Virtual reality is in its early days, and it has a bright future, proponents say. It’s not just gaming where virtual reality is making an impact. Entertainment, real estate, sports, medicine, industrial, architecture and many other industries are investing in virtual reality, Berry said.

Chris Donahue, senior director of alliances for AMD, broke down the extreme level of work that goes into making a virtual reality platform. Essentially, every time users move their heads, they are asking a computer what the world looks like from that angle, and that computer only has about 20 milliseconds to answer. Otherwise, Donahue said, users can get sick, and no one wants that.