Since an Iowa business that specialises in virtual reality constructed digital campuses, pupils from ten colleges across the country gained the ability to explore historical sites and perform surgery on cadavers right from their own homes.
Students at Morehouse College in Atlanta had faced problems with online learning all through the pandemic. VictoryXR, a Davenport, Iowa-based corporation, was approached by the university. Its CEO Steve Grubbs came up with the idea of developing a virtual edition of the facility.
Learners and teachers utilise virtual-reality headgear to interact with a three-dimensional CGI simulation of real-world locations and experiences. Those who are submerged in the virtual reality realm of the metaverse, are able to traverse the simulation and easily communicate with other individuals.
Morehouse instructors created the programme coursework within a time period of 10 weeks, and the metaverse will be developed by VictoryXR. The application has been utilised in Morehouse courses such as biology, inorganic chemistry, and global history.
According to Grubbs, the new development is helping the students at the university attend virtual classes within the metaverse. He emphasises that the institution will become the first one globally to offer such a facility for learners.
Facebook’s parent company Meta has teamed up with VictoryXR to broaden the scope of metaverse universities, following the digital education initiative being started at Morehouse College and Nashville’s Fisk University.
Morehouse College is among the ten different institutions of higher education that have qualified for the digital classrooms after receiving Meta’s grant. Based on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s public records request, the educational institutions are set to get funding upwards of 500 thousand dollars, along with VR headsets, as per the VictoryXR contract terms.
According to Grubbs, virtual reality technology helps to offer a closer-to-reality experience for the students, as opposed to conventional online meeting tools.
Grubbs remarked that students within the metaverse university share classrooms, in a way that is very similar to how they do so in real-life scenarios. In such a setting, they can collaborate with each other, participate in different projects and even interact with each other through their virtual limbs. He said that teachers have the ability to take out organs from cadavers and pass them over to students in the virtual space.
Grubbs claims that students working in the metaverse will obtain the same level of, or better education compared to when they are on campus.
According to Grubbs, those majoring in health science will be able to make the most of the virtual reality experience, along with those who are studying history. Grubbs believes that due to the decline of students attending campuses physically, and the rising popularity of remote learning, teaching methods have to become a lot more hands-on.
VictoryXR created a simulation of the courthouse from Harper Lee’s popular classic “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Students can appear alongside the jury or even sit on the chair of the judge whilst talking about the novel.
The immersive technology developer’s solutions are being adopted by several prominent educational institutions around the world.
