What is AR/VR Technology and how it is helpful for the Indian education System?

Imagine life in India pre-2000. School and college kids never had computers or had very little access to them. Teacher’s often relied on graphic art in textbooks or hand drawn material as visualization aid.

Then came along PPT’s and video presentation techniques with the ubiquity of computers. With or without the teachers help a student can quickly youtube a video of say how a piston engine works.

Visualization became much easier. Complex architecture diagrams, CAD drawings could be made. In some sense that is the quanta of leap we can expect through proliferation of AR/VR in education.

Now for a more focused answer, consider the following scenarios You are a medical student performing operation on a cadaver wearing an AR headmount display, The video/audio instructions on the display gives you instructions as you operate. Same analogy with any engineering system.

Virtual/Augmented Tours in museums. You can revisit the past. Google street view integrated with VR and 360 degree treadmill can give you the experience of walking through monumental places.

In essence, AR/VR is a 3D visualization device. It can be programmed to anything you like.

Currently the limitations include 1) natural marker detection and tracking, SLAM, 2) Bulky hardware (prolonged durations of wear is uncomfortable), 3) the best in the market include Microsoft Hololens, Magic Leap and Meta 2 AR glasses and they cost a bomb; hence cannot be scaled to be deployed into mainstream education.

AR glasses made using smartphones are no where comparable in terms of sensitivity of sensors for realtime accurate tracking or computational efficiency for SLAM and heavy rendering. But the future is promising. 4) Virtual Reality Sickness - the small lag between the head turn and the refresh on the screen can cause nausea.

There are lot of quirks as discussed above. But the future is promising.