Virtual reality has helped to revolutionize gaming in a new way for a new audience. There is now a range of different games that can be played with VR headsets, such as VR escape rooms and VR action games.
VR gaming has proved to be very popular as it offers the user a new experience compared to traditional gaming. Unfortunately, VR technology hasn’t quite made it into the home console market yet as equipment to play VR games can be quite expensive. However, technology does pose new advantages to medical university students and the police.
(Graph showing virtual reality gaming revenue. Source: Statista)
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As universities prepare to reopen, they are faced with some challenging situations which call for modern, technological solutions. In some cases, VR technology could help to play a pivotal role in education during the Covid-19 pandemic. Especially for medical students who need to be in labs learning in hands-on environments and situations.
Virtual labs, thanks the use of VR headsets and smartphones could change science education as we know it. VR labs create safe places for students to carry out experiments that may be difficult to carry out in the flesh due to the current climate. It also means that teaching can be done in larger groups as students do not physically have to be present.
Through the use of VR, the technology can place the student directly into the lab to carry out experiments. The technology can also help bend the rules of reality, taking students into human cells to understand the anatomy of cells better, providing an enriched learning experience. The simulation also gives students access to equipment that not all universities can afford, which proves it can be beneficial for students to learn this way as they can use state of the art lab equipment.
Although the use of VR technology shows great promise for the future of medical education, it still has a long way to go. Students who are currently using the technology have been experiencing some glitches. On a more obvious level, not all have access to VR headsets, making it challenging to implement over a wide scale. There is, of course, the option to use PC models which can be implemented across a wide range of students from a wider geographical scale.
VR technology for police training
Darbyshire police officers are learning how and when to use tasers with the help of VR technology. In normal circumstances, taser training is conducted in a room with a person dressed in a padded suit, armed with a dummy rubber knife who would then approach the officers. The officers use mock taser cartridges to subdue their fake victims. However, the taser cartridges are very costly, almost £30 per cartridge and the training does not represent real-life scenarios to scale.
For this reason, VR company AVRT has created a space which uses sensor mats, allowing officers to put on a VR head seat and roam around a virtual world. The technology allows officers in training to be transported to a street, rooftop or an alleyway to create a more realistic situation. An instructor who is watching from the outside and sees everything that is going on in the VR world can talk inside the program to the other person, creating a more realistic environment allowing offers to be fully submerged into the scenario.
Although VR technology is great at creating immersive real-life situations which can help in a range of different industries for training purposes, the data for how effective the technology is at teaching is still yet to be seen. The cost of implementing VR can be meagre when considering the amount of money that is spent on actual equipment such as lab microscopes and taser cartridges. However, unless the technology shows signs of proven advantages, there’s no evidence to suggest it is the solution to the problems we are facing today.