Hi,
I am Pyry Annanolli from Keuda, and I was part of the VRinvet -workshop as a student for few days.
I primarily helping how to use VR and VR apps to the teachers of other countries. This was their first experience in VR, so it was important to give them good experiences.
This reminded me of when I was going first time to virtual reality few years ago. It was much narrower experience in regards of good apps, but just in few years of time, the number of apps has increased a lot and schools have started to implement VR more efficiently. Platform apps on VR have come and went a lot, but some good platforms have stayed, such as Glue, Wonda, and few others.
I was pleasantly surprised how much easier it had become to use and teach how to use VR equipment. I reckon that biggest demographic to VR companies, both app makers and VR equipment producers, is going to be bigger parties, such as schools and companies. As current direction of VR development is going to be most beneficial to them.
The implementation of these platforms to international school projects has helped me to understand the potential of this kind of technology.
It was not only how effective they can be in training student to have normal conversation in another language (such as English), but also how much VR equipment can bring out other important parts of conversation skills, such as body language.
I have talked about this with Dutch student, and he shared similar kind of experiences of being able to communicate more easily with other students in VR.
In my opinion VR is good platform for teaching how to have conversations in other languages, as it has lower barrier of entry. It should be noted that even when students have received task, it sometimes doesn’t go as smoothly as teachers would have hoped. This isn’t necessarily bad thing, as the students usually get more familiar with each other in pretense of completing a task.
As a student myself, I hope that this kind of projects continue as it gives students chance to see more people all over the world. This would mean that hopefully world would become more interconnected, as everyone benefits from more knowledgeable people.
Pyry Annanolli