How does VR education affect learners, educators, and society?

The problems AR/VR ed (part 1): 1. Choosing a topic for creating AR/VR interpretation (educational content). The fact is that if we take highly specialized educational material, then the potential number of users is very small. And if we take the broadest topics (for example, secondary school), then the complexity of the material there usually does not require the use of such technologies. At school, the correctness of the usual material and the memory are much more important. 2. Budget for the creation of educational content on the topic. The budget for creating an AR/VR lesson with acceptable graphics and interactivity is quite high. Therefore, the usefulness of AR/VR educational content directly depends on the potential number of users.

According to William Glasser's "𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗣𝘆𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗱", "𝗽𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝗱𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗴" (which is found in the penultimate part of the base of the pyramid) improves content retention by 75%-80%, that is, when we are immersed in virtual reality, and playing a training experience, we exclude the true risks that we have in our reality, thus allowing us to understand them (including learning from them in practice), and better capturing the learning.

One of the clearest and most demonstrable benefits that learners get from VR experiences is the ability to - just that - experience something. Any education tool that switches learning from passive to active invariably leads to deeper engagements with learners. This section is focused on core education, but also goes beyond - an interactive documentary, explain chemical reactions in a laboratory setting, teaching soft skills like public speaking, and so on. VR creates a safe space to engage with content, build memory associations, and create organic mind maps that remain in the subconscious for a long time.

VR does not do ANY of the things listed here - it makes most/all of these worse, less effective, more expensive. Every educator knows this. The true benefit of VR in education is: increasing the volume of information processed by learners without overwhelming them, enabling complex learning in environments that otherwise would be impossible. e.g. visualising the detailed 3D geometry of folded proteins (difficult to do any other way). But this requires specialist, expensive, content produced by 3rd parties.

With the problems like any other new tech, VR would have some limitations for a while. But the most important aspect of today's social media affected world is desensitization, or lesser satisfaction with reality compared to made-up existences. VR can help build a social distinction between physical and virtual worlds if adopted at early ages. A virtual reality educational experience combined with socio-interactive real world experiences, sports and activities for kids, can help stabilize the human polarization issues of today's society in a great way.

An interesting security risk: Meta/Oculus bans developers from recording the pattern of 'how' a person moves in 3D (which is highly individual, at the millimeter level) to record a 'virtual fingerprint' to be used in future advertising and anti-privacy tracking - something that would potentially bypass security/privacy laws. There are unexpected threats that come with this new tech...

Regulation compliances, content selection and teacher's training would be the most important aspects and challenges on VR education. And there should be absolutely no compromise on this. Since VR has the potential of becoming an inevitable part of the human education systems, it is absolutely necessary to focus on these to lay strong foundations for a better future!