Transforming Education with XR for Pedagogy

In today's digital age, immersive technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Extended Reality (XR) are playing an increasingly important role in education. With the power to create interactive and engaging learning environments, these technologies have the potential to revolutionise how we teach and learn. One project that aims to harness this potential is the Erasmus+ XR4Ped project.

The XR4Ped Project

XR4Ped, led by the University of Primorska, Slovenia, is a collaborative project that involves several European educational institutions including FHM GMBH, University of Applied Science, Germany; E.N.T.E.R. GMBH, Austria; University College Dublin, Ireland; Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and Rakka, Finland. The project aims to tackle the lack of awareness and understanding of digital learning opportunities among educators and foster digitisation in higher education.

The mission of XRforPED is to bridge the gap between the digital world and pedagogy by offering novel learning opportunities. The project aims to conduct surveys, create an analytical Green Paper, develop a study course with immersive learning modules, and establish an XR4Ped Lecture Theatre. The project aims to train 140 lecturers and students through an XR4Ped study course pilot and estimates 500 annual course participants. It also expects that another 2,000 educators will use the open-source self-learning units to train themselves.

To realise these objectives, XRforPED has adopted Mozilla Hubs, a fully open-source virtual world platform that allows users to create and control their own online communities. Mozilla Hubs offers an immersive web experience right from your browser, providing a novel way to connect online. Instead of traditional video calls, participants can gather as avatars in a virtual space, replicating natural conversations with spatialized 3D audio.

Mozilla Hubs is versatile and can be tailored to various needs. It can be used to host virtual events, create digital galleries, build spaces for hobbies, establish classrooms, and even have meetings on a virtual planet. Users can customise their Hubs, choosing environments and avatars that represent their community. Media sharing is also a key feature, allowing users to import and share 3D models, PDFs, images, gifs, videos, and audio with their guests.

Another vital aspect of Mozilla Hubs is its accessibility. It works across devices, meaning that guests can join from any device with a modern browser, without the need for any downloads. This feature makes it an ideal platform for XRforPED's mission, reaching a wide range of educators regardless of their technical skills or equipment.

In the XRforPED Mozilla Hubs room, all materials for the training modules are hosted. These modules include presentations, tutorial videos, best practice examples, and assignments. Instructions on how to use these materials are also provided, ensuring a smooth and engaging learning experience. This virtual space can be used for online teaching and learning, and the materials can be downloaded for in-class use.

XRforPED and Mozilla Hubs together are paving the way for the future of education. By integrating immersive digital technologies into pedagogy, they are enriching the learning experience and equipping educators with the tools they need in a rapidly digitising world. This endeavour promises to bring about a transformative change in education, promoting an inclusive, accessible, and innovative learning environment for all.

Join us on this exciting journey to reshape education, and experience the power of immersive learning with XRforPED and Mozilla Hubs.

Ilmari Huttu-Hiltunen / RAKKA

https://www.xr4ped.eu/

2022 perspective on the major XR platforms and players from the SME perspective

It is 2022 and a new wave of XR technologies is hitting the markets. We are seeing major developments that will affect the dynamics for the years to come. In this article, we’re going to sweep through the most significant ones and evaluate their impact for especially SME companies in Europe looking to take advantage of this developing technology. 

As far as the platforms are concerned, Facebook is definitely making the biggest statement about their future as the company changed its name to “Meta” as in metaverse. Clearly, Meta is the worldwide leader in consumer-grade VR technology and the VR gaming ecosystem as their Quest platform, store, content and developer community combination is really reaching the point of a self-sustaining ecosystem.

Microsoft is still well positioned to take charge of the enterprise sector and keeps on integrating XR technology into their mainstream platforms to enable easy and cost-effective use for their existing customers. In early 2021 they released Mesh and in late 2021 they announced that 3D avatars will be available in Teams in the first half of 2022 which is laying the groundwork for “immersive meetings”. 

Varjo, a Finnish high-end XR headset manufacturer, also launched their Teleport VR service and Varjo Reality Cloud, a step towards becoming a true end-to-end service provider in the metaverse space instead of just a hardware manufacturer.

Rumors go that Apple is cooking (pun intended) something behind the scenes and we’ll see whether they launch something this year or in the future. During the last years Google seems to have been mainly cutting their XR efforts except for the ARCore capabilities on their Android phones. However, taking into account the strategic importance of this paradigm shift, they’ll definitely keep themselves well positioned, at least internally and core technologies, in relation to other major players.

Even though the major players are investing a great deal of resources to develop core technologies, we still face the reality that large scale implementations are tedious or prohibitively expensive. VAMR project* contributors created a University-Business Cooperation Handbook that goes into details in various perspectives regarding specific use cases and will provide a more comprehensive picture about the overall situation.

From the SME perspective the key to taking advantage of these technologies really boils down to agility and experimentation. Value extraction depends on matching the use case and the technology correctly - which might not be an obvious task. Sometimes actual use case requirements are found out after doing experiments, thus proceeding in an agile manner definitely pays off.

Some concrete starting points for an SME looking to understand this technology and begin their XR journey would be to:

1. Contact an expert and discuss your needs and ideas (e.g. from VAM Realities Network)

2. Try out a Quest device and some applications available form the Oculus Store

3. Check out some actual use cases from the VAM Realities Handbook

After gathering some initial experience and understanding of the possibilities of the technology, it is time to start to gather ideas and concrete use cases inside the company. Starting small also makes sense here. Bringing a 3D model into VR or AR is an easy first step and further enhancing it for marketing, sales or training purposes is a great second step. 2022 is a perfect time to start the journey.

*VAM Realities project is about bringing core XR technology understanding and possibilities for SME manufacturing companies in Europe. Partners in nine countries have been working hard on creating assets that enable these manufacturing companies to take advantage of cutting-edge technologies. https://vam-realities.eu/

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