Extending Our Reality
Technological advancements have opened so many opportunities for the world to take and when it comes to our reality, technology has advanced how far we are able to reach. With creations like Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), we are able to add onto our own world or even escape to worlds that are nothing like the world we live in.
In general, when I think of AR and VR, I immediately think of gaming and all that it has brought to the gaming industry. Games like Beat Saber, Pokémon GO, and Superhot are especially popular AR and VR games that even people who don’t play video games that much may know about. The games created on VR allow the user to step into a different world where they can wander about and interact with things that don’t exist in our reality all from within a single room of their own house. AR does something similar by allowing creatures and items that don’t exist to appear as if they do, letting people do such things as appearing to hold an apple in their hand when there may not even be an apple in the building with them. It expands the reach of our reality by just picking up your phone or placing on a headset.
However, in the research that we did this week on AR and VR, I was reminded that this technology was used for even more things than gaming. For a long time, since as early as the 1960s according to a timeline of the history of VR, VR has been used by the military for both training and as a tactical advantage. Because VR can be used remotely, the military could safely survey an area for any danger before they physically went in themselves with a camera placed at that location that they could move by wearing a headset and looking around like they would if they were there. As VR progressed, so did the capabilities of it that the military were able to use. Flight training could be done from the ground while still giving the user a realistic enough feeling that it helped them learn how to fly actual planes. It’s really interesting to learn all of that because it shows how much the technology can offer that isn’t just for fun and how it can actually be used to imitate real situations without the risks of them.
AR also has uses that extend much further like how it has been able to help children on the autism spectrum as using AR can help them understand how objects interact easier. Because AR can offer the ability to make interactive playsets for the children to learn and use from, they are able to physically see the interactions between objects rather than only being able to try to imagine the situation. It also increases their social skills as a study done by scientists from the Children and Technology Lab at the University of Sussex showed. They watched children using AR to learn and play and saw that its use boosted the interactions of the children with each other rather than the more solitary play they had when not using AR. It’s interesting to think how much virtual realities can offer people with disabilities that we would not realize as much. With virtual reality, objects can be created from nothing and help people have better understandings of situations that they would otherwise not have been able to do or see in a way that makes sense to them.
As technology progresses, I believe that virtual reality will be able to expand even further than it already has with interactions becoming even more realistic so that users feel even more immersed. There are entire shows and movies dedicated to what people believe virtual realities will offer in the future like Sword Art Online and Ready Player One. Both, while extreme cases that I don’t think we will reach, I believe show good examples of the possibilities that virtual reality can become. I think that VR especially has the potential to become even more immersive to the users both for games or simulations like the military and other companies will use to train people. Because virtual realities will likely become more realistic with time, I do believe that new opportunities for learning will arise with the advancements of virtual reality because it allows more situations to be available for people to see or interact with that may otherwise have been impossible for them to see or do. One of the concerns when it comes to virtual realities though is costs though. VR headsets already cost hundreds which is not the most affordable thing for people to afford let alone schools using that technology for teaching. While AR is more affordable in many senses because it can be used on devices as simple as a smartphone which is becoming more common for people to have, but, again, being able to ensure that every student has the ability to access that technology can be quite costly for a school or their families and not everyone has that kind of access to money for that. If the use of virtual realities becomes more common in teaching environments, the places that cannot offer that type of teaching risk their students not learning to the same standards most others are.
