#008: Making the (virtual) world a better place
Part II: Progress
Today’s edition is an 11-minute read. If you’re in a hurry, here are the takeaways:
This is the second of three posts about RISC’s virtual reality project, where we explored ways to use virtual reality for good. In this post, I’ll talk about our efforts to find ideas and bring them to life.
Because there were so many ways we could imagine doing good with virtual reality, we decided to narrow our focus to one impact area: education. It made sense as a starting place given RISC’s most successful work, but we didn’t have a specific idea for how virtual reality would make an impact in education or what our role would be in doing that.
From our experiences in the Oculus headset and our conversations with experts in the field, it was clear that virtual reality could be a great tool for learning. In the very best case, it could unlock new ways to learn old concepts: you could potentially become a better reader by immersing yourself in the world of a book or gain a better intuition for math by interacting with a virtual world. But we weren’t quite sure how, and we didn’t really know what was out there already.
We were generally underwhelmed by the state of educational VR. Much of the content revolves around virtual field trips. Google Expeditions and Nearpod VR have gotten really good at transporting kids to virtual places and letting them look around, which kids love. But the level of interactivity is very low, and we saw that as an important dimension of learning in VR. Why just go there when you can go there and do stuff?
We went out and talked to a bunch of teachers, startups and industry leaders to understand how they were thinking about educational VR. For a variety of reasons, few schools have VR headsets that allow for interactivity. Thus, developers have no incentive to build interactive educational content. But since there isn’t much interactive educational content, schools have no incentive to make the investment in high-powered VR headsets. So we’re stuck with virtual field trips because they’re more affordable and usable right now.
We had a few different ideas for how we might get involved. If the barriers were content creation and classroom adoption, maybe we could catalyze one or both of those things. As it turned out, for each of our ideas, we were either not well-suited to execute on them or someone else had beaten us to them. But we learned a lot along the way!
Last week, I talked about the genesis of RISC’s virtual reality project. We came into this project not with a specific idea but with a general sense that virtual reality could be used for good. When we ended last time, Steve had just commissioned the project, a stroke of luck considering I had been researching the positive uses of virtual reality on my own in the months leading up to that moment. If you want to read more about the idea and the inspiration behind it, check out last week’s post here.
Because there were so many ways we could imagine doing good with virtual reality, we decided to narrow our focus to one impact area. In truth, we didn’t spend a lot of time picking an area. I felt lucky that Steve was interested enough to let us explore a virtual reality project, so I didn’t push back when he suggested that we look at applications of VR to education. Some of RISC’s most prominent work had been in education, so it made sense as a starting place.
What’s weird about this project is that we didn’t have a specific idea for how virtual reality would make an impact in education or what our role would be in doing that. We just knew that we wanted to think about how virtual reality could help kids learn better. If we came up with any good ideas, then we’d try to figure out how to make them happen. In this post, I’ll talk about our efforts to find ideas and bring them to life.
The unique strengths of VR seemed conducive to learning
From our experiences in the Oculus headset and our conversations with experts in the field (which, again, you can read about in my last post here), it was clear that virtual reality can (1) put you in virtual contexts that feel real and (2) allow you to interact with those virtual contexts. With those powers, it could be a great tool for learning. At the very least, it could be a more engaging way to learn: you could learn about history by transporting yourself back in time rather than by reading a textbook. At the very best, it could unlock new ways to learn old concepts: you could potentially become a better reader by immersing yourself in the world of a book or gain a better intuition for math by interacting with a virtual world. How? Well, we weren’t quite sure. But we wanted to push the boundaries of possibility.
VR is engaging and enables learning by doing, but we didn’t know the first thing about creating great educational content. And we didn’t really know what was out there already. We were by no means the first people to think about VR as a tool for learning. In fact, there had been a lot of people thinking about this already, and we knew basically nothing! So our first order of business was to understand the state of VR in education. And from there, we could figure out if and how we would get involved.
Existing educational VR was limited in quantity and use
We started our research with the Oculus Quest 2 in our office, downloading any educational app we could find. The first thing we noticed was that there wasn’t a ton of educational content, and it was difficult to find educational apps because there was no tag for “education” in the search bar. Nonetheless, we scoured the app store and found a handful of experiences. We toured the Anne Frank House, explored towns and refugee camps in Iraq, floated around the International Space Station, swam with sharks and sea turtles, and experienced the world as a blind person did. These experiences were cool, but truthfully I didn’t learn a lot.
The most notable experience was in Iraq. In this experience, you explore a man’s home and his hometown of Fallujah as he tells you how things have changed since the Islamic State has left. The most compelling part was how it was filmed. In several short scenes, your perspective comes from a 360-degree camera placed in the middle of real people doing real life things, once during a town meeting and once during a family dinner. You can’t interact with anyone, but real adults and children look back and forth between you and the situation at hand. It feels like you’re locking eye contact with them. Without any verbal or physical exchange, I felt a human connection with these people, something that I’ve never felt from watching a video (or at least it doesn’t happen so quickly). I don’t know if this is learning, but it was a visceral experience.
The Anne Frank experience felt like a tour at the museum. If the goal was to make it possible for anyone to tour the Anne Frank House in the Netherlands, then the creators did that. I don’t learn well from tours, so the experience was a bit boring. But it turns out that much of educational VR follows the trope of virtual field trips. Google Expeditions and Nearpod VR have gotten really good at transporting kids to virtual places and letting them look around. Kids apparently love this sort of content, and I’m not opposed to it. But the level of interactivity is very low, and we saw that as an important dimension of learning in VR. Why just go there when you can go there and do stuff?
From our perspective, VR had the potential to help kids learn math, science, or reading, not just show them what the Pyramids look like. Even in the Iraq example above, I didn’t just visit Iraq and look around; I learned something about the people and the culture by sitting amongst them. We wondered if people in the industry were trying to push educational VR in the direction of more interactivity.
Educational VR is stuck because of the economics
We went out and talked to a bunch of teachers, startups and industry leaders to understand how they were thinking about educational VR, and we heard a similar story over and over. There’s a chicken and egg problem that keeps educational VR content stuck on virtual field trips, despite an understanding that VR could potentially do much more for education.
Most kids aren’t going to use educational content unless it’s forced on them in school, but the headsets that allow for the most interactivity are the most expensive, have the least amount of content, and are the hardest to use in the classroom. While Google Expeditions and Nearpod VR are limited to virtual field trips, their headsets are much more affordable (in fact, you can do their field trips from a phone). And actually cost isn’t the only adoption inhibitor; for instance, the Oculus is hard to use in the classroom due to wifi bandwidth constraints and content not being designed for lesson plans or multi-person use. For many districts, the argument in favor of VR headsets is better student engagement rather than improved learning outcomes, and you don’t need a high-powered headset to get students engaged. For all these reasons, very few schools have high-powered VR headsets.
Since few schools have VR headsets that allow for interactivity, developers have no incentive to build interactive educational content. But since there isn’t much interactive educational content, schools have no incentive to make the investment in high-powered VR headsets. So we’re stuck on virtual field trips because they’re more usable and affordable right now.
A problem was emerging: someone needed to break the chicken and egg problem in order to spark innovation in educational VR. But was RISC really well-suited to do that?
It turns out we weren’t well-suited to do that
Thinking about how we could bridge the gap between interactive VR and the classroom, we had a few different ideas for how we might get involved. If the barriers were content creation and classroom adoption, then maybe we could catalyze one or both of those things. As it turned out, for each of our ideas, we were either not well-suited to execute on them or someone else had beaten us to them.
Our first idea was pie in the sky: we would try to develop the next generation of educational VR content ourselves and try it out in some classrooms. By trying our content in some classrooms, we could test whether we were helping kids learn the material better than traditional methods. It turned out to be easy to find the classrooms willing to test out VR, and we even dreamed up a few VR lesson ideas. But when it came down to development, we didn’t feel enough conviction in any of our ideas to pursue this route. It would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to make our content, and we didn’t have that kind of money. Even if we did, we would have been better off paying an amazing teacher to come up with the content ideas.
If creating our own content was out of the picture, we thought that maybe we could build lesson plans from existing interactive VR content and give lesson plans along with Oculus headsets to a few classrooms to test them out. But it turned out that David Kaser, a teacher from Barberton, Ohio, had already developed lesson plans for a bunch of existing VR apps, and an organization called foundry10 was already working on in-classroom pilots with VR and learning a lot about how to make VR more suitable for the classroom. Neither David nor foundry10 seemed to need the extra help, so we figured these ideas were in good hands.
We had other ideas, but they felt small compared to our initial aspirations. We wanted Google to provide resources to school districts so that they could find new uses for their now defunct Expeditions headsets (a problem we heard from several teachers). We wanted Meta to go on a roadshow to school districts to generate excitement for interactive VR content and learn what it would take to increase adoption. It’s hard to get big, for-profit companies to pay attention to your ideas.
In the end, it felt like we were late to the game and not a good fit for making an impact in the VR education space. Other people were far more experienced than we were and had already made far more progress than we could have made on our own. From my perspective, our only unique addition to the space would have been coming up with out-of-the-box content ideas, but meeting the team at Lighthaus gave us comfort that at least someone was pushing toward an interesting future for educational VR content. My bet is on them to lead this space.
Even though we hit a dead end with VR in education, we learned a lot about the VR industry, the education industry, and RISC’s own strengths and weaknesses. In my next post, I’ll talk about what we would have done differently and some other applications of VR I’d love to think more about.
See you then :)
Noah