Photo Courtesy of Times Higher Education
"In Ready Player One, perhaps the best known novel yet written about virtual reality (VR), the protagonist Wade Watts lives in a cramped trailer, scavenges for food and has to dodge murderers and rapists on a bleak and dangerous compound on the outskirts of Oklahoma City.
Yet although he lives in a dystopian vision of the world in 2044, the teenage Wade in some ways has access to a better education than any young person today.
Because he can plug into a wildly popular, hyper-realistic virtual world called the OASIS, Wade is able to attend a virtual school where teachers take their classes on astonishing field trips: they go inside the human heart to watch how it pumps blood around the body; they witness archaeologists discover Tutankhamen’s tomb; or they stand on the volcanic surface of Jupiter’s moon Io to observe the planet’s Great Red Spot.
His teachers, also logged in to the virtual world, are highly motivated, largely because they can effectively mute pupils’ avatars to prevent any bad behaviour.
VR has long been a staple of science fiction. But this year sees the release of several consumer headsets that are advanced enough to fool users’ unconscious minds into believing that they really are in another world – something called “presence” in the jargon of the industry – and largely eliminate the nausea that plagued earlier products in the 1990s."
Read more at Times Higher Education