Dream Labs VR

The field of educational VR is in its infancy. Despite this however, we can already see clear signs that it is becoming one of the most fertile corners in the virtual reality landscape.

Goldman Sachs, in their seminal report on VR, recognised that education was going to become highly disrupted by the new technology - with a conservative estimate of $0.7billion being awarded to the educational VR sector by 2020 (just 0.2% of the expected $252billion EdTech market).

In recent months, Oculus have noticed an early trend for educational content and have now dedicated an entire section of their VR app store to it (stating that approximately 10% of the entire store falls into the category of educational VR). Further still, they have chosen to feed this burgeoning sector by creating a $10million fund for content creators focusing on educational material.

Google have also recognised the value of educational VR early on. With the creation of Google Expeditions they have defined an entire ecosystem for facilitating the distribution of mobile quality educational VR content.

So why has educational VR become such an early success story for VR? To us, the answer is simple, you simply need to don a VR helmet and experience the award winning Titans of Space or Apollo 11 to understand how powerful this new medium is.

With VR, you can teleport anywhere and see anything. You can slice a planet in half to examine its molten core. You can wander through a human heart and listen as it beats around you. You can manipulate atoms or explore the heavens. With VR, there are no limits to what you can do. And with every new experience, you learn.

Learning in VR is not like learning through a book. Learning in VR is (as Google have been quick to recognise) more akin to learning on an excursion. With educational VR, you are fully immersed and full engaged with the world around you. In VR you interact with objects. Look at them from all angles possible. Break them apart. Understand them. Experience them.

Psychologists have already shown that educational VR triggers a completely different kind of learning than book learning and that the parts of the brain involved with learning in VR are the experiential parts of the brain - the “it happened to me” parts. Recollections of these experiences thus come in the form of things “that happened to me” and are far richer and fuller than simple “fact recollections”. In short. Not only are people more engaged with learning in VR, they actually use more of their brains and have much richer recollections of the lessons learnt.

As the world of VR expands, more and more commentators are beginning to recognise just how well suited the medium is for education. For some, ourselves included, it is fast becoming the “killer app” that the VR community has been looking for.

Perhaps the Goldman Sach’s estimations for market disruption were conservative. Maybe education is on the cusp of a content revolution.

Dream Labs VR is proud to be at the beginning of this fantastic opportunity - and we look forwards with great enthusiasm to see what the future holds for everyone working in this exciting and important space.

If you have an educational VR project idea, and are looking for a partner to help you develop it, we would be absolutely delighted to hear from you. Send us an email or get in touch and one of our team will contact you to help turn your dreams into an virtual reality.