Virtual Reality U

As the online education market continues to expand, I wonder what the next big thing will be. At the Minerva Schools at KGI (Keck Graduate Institute), all students “attend” class via a fully online portal. The system is essentially a souped-up Learning Management System (LMS) with built-in video (somewhat like Google Hangouts) and tools developed based on the literature coming out of cognitive learning research. Interestingly, the students, at least in their first year, all live together in the same space, but take their classes online with fixed class meeting times, somewhat like at a bricks-and-mortar college. The instructors, though, might be anywhere in the world logging in at the appointed fixed meeting times.

Based on promotional video snippets from the internet, the interface looks like a Google Hangout with custom features. Everyone in the class sees each other as a talking head. Students can collaboratively jot down ideas or work on a problem on a Google Docs-like interface. But there isn’t much physical motion beyond that. It’s typing and speaking in turn. What if you could have a classroom similar to an environment I first saw in the movie Minority Report, where Tom Cruise manipulates virtual items in the space around him? One could imagine a virtual reality (VR) setup with advanced sensor technology allowing you to experience something similar.

Furthermore, what if our high-speed internet connections could be fed directly into the VR stream? We might be able to see and interact with others seemingly as live 3D avatars moving around in space without bumping into each other while we collaboratively manipulate digital objects. Could this be Third Life, the 3-D version of Second Life? Instructors could be right there in the thick of things with the students. The entire class could be transported into a digitized environment, like the holodeck in Star Wars. Art museums, historical sites, even virtual science labs, could all be interesting educational environments. As a chemist, it would be amazing to be in a simulation where we could viscerally observe the swirl of millions of molecules. Or perhaps enter the crowded busy environment of a cell resembling a supercity on the micron scale. We could find ourselves atop Mount Everest or walking the surface of Mars.

This could be Virtual Reality U, a new wave immersive university experience that preserves first and foremost the relational part of learning between teacher and student, but overlays that bringing the wonders of the world viscerally into your living room. Or for a more tactile experience, I could envision commercialized spaces containing sensor-laden physical objects that can be overlaid with digital information. Play and learning come together in a visceral experience. The Learning Lab of Tomorrow could far surpass the learning labs of today.

As A.I. agents become more advanced, and more difficult to distinguish via a Turing-like test, such learning labs could be populated with resources of knowledge that can answer questions and aid in learning new things. I imagine Jarvis from the Iron Man movies as an indispensable aid to science research. The world’s knowledge is being interconnected into a sprawling gargantuan system. All that web surfing you’re doing – it is training multiple A.I. agents. Every time you click, when you make a post, when you ask a question, when you answer a question, when you tag or caption a picture, the A.I.’s are being trained. Believe it or not, you are writing code, every time you access the internet. Not in the way you imagine an old school code-writer but by how you interact with this web-like system.

Welcome to V.R.U. The future is here. Maybe.