3D learning with virtual reality
June 19, 2020
Teleported from your chair
October 7, 2020
Name: Atish Gonsalves
Location: London, England
Job: Global Innovation Director at the Humanitarian Leadership Academy
& Founder of Gamoteca
“It’s an opportunity to go to new worlds. Explore a new place with no boundaries. Be a different person.”
Pushing beyond
“I’ve been working a lot in the field of e-learning for the last 10-15 years. I’ve been finding that increasingly we aren’t pushing the boundaries in terms of making learning more immersive and engaging. We’ve been exploring three areas: game-based learning, virtual learning, and AI in education. The main goal has been to make learning more engaging and practical, pushing beyond traditional e-learning.
We learn best by practicing. VR is an opportunity for practicing
What particularly interested me about VR was to take learning beyond knowledge content consumption to behavioral and practice-based learning. Where you aren’t just seeing or hearing how to do it, but actually doing it.”
“What’s been driving me is making VR something much more accessible. Whether it’s technical skills or behavioral soft skills, VR has many practical applications.
Spatial aspects of VR are quite interesting. Imagine being in a VR experience where people get very close to you, you get uncomfortable and have a visceral reaction.
At times, VR is critiqued for being very individual, but it doesn’t have to be. When we watch a movie together or we engage in something, we have a shared experience. VR in entertainment hasn’t been very successful, because you lose a shared experience.
There are possibilities when we both can join together by going on a VR adventure or solving a problem together. Mixing physical and virtual worlds solves this problem. There are expeditions that allow teachers to take their students on virtual school trips to the Louvre in Paris. This integrates the physical within the virtual, making it a shared experience.”