Smartphone-based VR headsets open up new possibilities for learning

Connectivism guru Stephen Downes is right to point out alternatives for Oculus Rift such as Google Cardboard. You can buy these things (which allow to convert smartphones into VR devices) from others or build it yourself. I never tried it out myself so I cannot compare with Oculus Rift, but I see the pedagogical advantages of building oneself a virtual headset. Downes refers to a blog post by Donald Clark: 7 learning principles that work in VR (one of those principles being “learning by doing”).

In the meantime Samsung Gear VR is now officially available in the US, it launches internationally ‘early 2015′, so Road to VR says. The interesting thing about these smartphone-based VR headsets is that they allow for short-term immersive experiences, untied to desktops or laptops so the devices are easier to share.

Immersive experiences for short attention spans

One of my doubts about immersive media such as virtual worlds is that they are often extremely time-consuming – either you ‘get it’ and stay for hours in-world or you don’t and you leave without ever returning. In this new mutation of immersive media however one can dip into an immersive environment – for instance to enjoy a song in a VR setting as suggests Maria Korolov on Hypergrid Business:

Obviously, the killer app for virtual reality is going to be music videos. The length of a song is just about the right amount of time for an easy introduction to VR, and after you’ve watched it, you can pass it around to all your friends.

Now imagine the typical short educational videos used for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) – one could imagine using lightweight mobile VR headsets for accessing short immersive experiences in this context. I first had to smile looking at the smartphone-based headsets, but now I realize they open up very new possibilities.

This work by rolandlegrand is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International