VR, AR and XR

Virtual Reality Oculus VR by Jennifer Garcialrc

Over the last few months Mr. Padilla, our Design/ICT Tech teacher has been busily working to prepare and engage students with the Oculus Quest headsets. 

We have explored how can we use the Oculus (Now Meta) Quest 2 headsets in the classroom, along with some engaging content, like 360 videos, Mozilla Hubs, Mozilla Spoke, Unity, and other tools. There is great potential to use the headsets with our current projects to make walkthroughs, integrate animation, and explore video game design with them. 

There is also some interest in using the devices for EE projects and for certain subjects, particularly when we need to experience how things work (Physics, chemistry, biology), or visit far away places, particularly those difficult to reach or even dangerous, in a safe immersive way.

Our next steps will be to research novel ways to further merge the digital and physical world through haptic technologies and explore spaces and design through the use of Mozilla Hubs.

Further items to improve will be the support for Teacher-led experiences by syncing or controlling all the devices to play a certain resource or content at the same time, improve how we can share the experiences to a wider audience using streaming. Students should also ideally start to produce some content to integrate their projects with this technology.

These headsets motivate all students to explore through augmented, virtual, and mixed reality experiences. Applications for using these devices go far beyond simple gaming and leisure activities and can impact positively across most disciplines including but not inclusive of health, sports and medicine, education and training, design and engineering, history and geography. 

During these last two weeks, our students in 9th and 11th computer science and 11th ITGS have had opportunities to explore the technologies used with these devices as well as practical applications through experiential learning in lessons. 

Students from across the school also had the opportunity to explore this technology during STEAM Fest 2022 at the Oculus Playground. 

Here is the link to our flickr photo gallery for this set of experiences.