For the past few decades, Educational spaces have remained unchanged in the United States. These spaces included the basics of a classroom like chairs, tables, books, some decorations, a board, and a projector.
Although some lessons could theoretically be taught in this space, there was nothing exciting about them. They were plain, and often felt more like a prison than a place of exploration. TV and Movies have shown us what classrooms of the future would look like, and they certainly didn’t look like anything we have now. These futuristic classrooms were more technology based, happening either in someone’s home or in an completely new type of classroom. These spaces included holograms, 3D sound, and headsets that could transport the user to ancient Rome to see the markets or experience the surface of Mars.
For many years, especially in the 90’s and early 2000’s these types of experiences of a “Virtual Classroom” only existed in Science Fiction media. Thanks to the advancements of applications such as ENGAGE XR, headsets by HTC Vive and new companies such as the Metaverse Construction Company, these experiences are becoming more of a reality by the day. Now more than ever, the demand for remote or in person Virtual Classrooms has risen, with the traditional classroom becoming outdated.
OptimaEd, who use the ENGAGE XR app as the platform for their own virtual school recently came on the ENGAGED show and said “We make history come alive in our classroom in ways I never thought we would be able to do”. OptimaEd continued to explain that in VR, the classroom can become anything we can imagine such as another country, another planet, or a completely different universe entirely.
With the popularity of the Virtual Classroom rising, educational institutions will need to restructure how they see the traditional classroom.
