XR and 3D Content for Higher Education – Part 1

Working from home, I was fascinated with my 8th grader conducting his entire school work with his teachers on Google classroom. This led me to imagine can XR and 3D Content for Higher Education be a good enabler to students imagination. He has various subjects managed by teachers, and the students are like miniature employees getting tasks and assignments with links to resources, documents, videos and other supporting content. My son has to complete assignments in writing, create slides with images, draw, add videos from Youtube, and use apps available in the google classroom ecosystem. He can also collaborate with classmates on projects and assignments. Assignments are completed and submitted. Teachers assign a grade and the cycle continues. Teachers and students work in perfect harmony. Live classes are conducted on Google Meet (some on Zoom). It’s a perfect digital learning environment!

As I dug further into Google’s education ecosystem, I came across their VR/AR product offering. 

Unfortunately, Google is going to discontinue the first offering on their educational AR/VR page. I also heard that Google Poly, which is a fantastic repository of 3D models and art work, will be discontinued later this year. Clicking explore all of Google’s AR/VR offering takes me to a site which has nothing to do with education. I did find a couple of VR/AR partner apps. One from Coursera that offers a course on VR/AR. The second is Labster which offers bundles of subject based apps. For completeness, you can find some more experiences here. The dearth of VR/AR options was a huge surprise and disappointment to me.

In the next part of this blog series we will delve into some the key hurdles standing in the path of bringing XR and 3D into everyday remote classroom experiences.