a VR experience Created by students at the New School in New York City, the piece is designed to take viewers to an almond farm in California and illustrate the effects of pesticides on honey bee colonies. First, participants wearing VR headsets can walk around a virtual forest and listen to the rustling of leaves and the buzzing of bees.
Then, with the push of a button, the user can select another viewpoint.
“You can be a bee,” explains Maya Georgieva, the university’s administrator. innovation center“And we can understand what happens to bee colonies when pesticides are sprayed all over the place to protect the trees, and what happens inside the hive when the bees are struggling. You can see if there are any.”
The goal is not just to create virtual field trips to farms that students in the classroom may not have access to. The hope is that immersive technology will provide changes in perspective that are simply not possible in the physical world, but can be simulated in emerging virtual reality spaces.
“I think this is a kind of empathy machine and has tremendous emotional power,” says Georgieva, who through her has become a leading voice on where VR is going. . blog and speaking in public. Flying around like a bee helps users “really embody the moment we’re living in, including climate change and some of the choices we make,” she says.
She says some of the best examples of VR in education are short, intense experiences that are carefully integrated into larger classroom lessons, like a student project with bees.
“It’s not just five, 10, 15 minutes in the headset. What happened before this and what happened after this is what’s driving more critique, deeper conversations, more curiosity. It just sets the stage for creation,” she says.
Edsage spoke with Georgieva after the match. A lecture she gave last month At the SXSW EDU Festival, she spoke about the direction of VR in education, the types of applications it’s best suited for, and its breaking points.
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