Recently updated on November 27th, 2021 at 05:46 pm
Imagine when you need to see and meet your lecturer face-to-face even if it is in VR. That is what happen to Stanford University students who took the Virtual People course. From their home, each of the students need to wear a VR headset and use the handheld controllers to move around in their virtual environments.
Prior to that, the university made an effort to mail the VR headsets to the students. From the image above, looks like they are using the Oculus Quest 2 VR headset. From there, the students created the avatars for themselves and then they virtually met up for classes.
What is Virtual People Course?
The Virtual People course examines VR’s expanding and evolving role in areas including popular culture, communication, engineering and behavioral science. Although the course has been taught since 2003, but only recently the class can be taught entirely in VR. Thanks to the advancement of VR technology happens lately.
For the Stanford University, the Virtual People course is among the first and longest courses to be taught almost entirely in VR. During the summer quarter, the classes spent more than 60,000 shared minutes together in VR. And during fall, it is expected to spend about 140,000 shared minutes. Wow! That’s quite a lot of VR screen time.
From Jeremy Bailenson who is the founding director of Stanford’s VHIL (Virtual Human Interaction Lab):
To the best of my knowledge, nobody has networked hundreds of students via VR headsets for months at a time in the history of virtual reality, or even in the history of teaching. It’s VR at an incredible scale.
Jeremy Bailenson
Example of VR Learning Experience…
What the Stanford students experience while learning in VR sounds so fun. One guest lecturer shows students how to learn about football plays in VR. And the students also manage to create their own virtual scenes such as tea parties with fairies in fantasy style world.
It looks like VR approach is now become a norm to this course and it will continue even after the coronavirus pandemic is over. For more info, you can read it at:
- “Stanford course allows students to learn about virtual reality while fully immersed in VR environments” from Stanford News.
- Virtual Human Interaction Lab of Stanford University.
For more news related with VR world and industry, you can read it here. Credit to Tobin Asher/VHIL on the image above.
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