Hello there, my name is Eric Hawkinson. Please call me Eric.
I’m here at the FutureHub at the Kyoto University of Foreign Studies and this is a representation of immersive technologies in educational contexts.
I’m being surrounded by video that’s usually being used in something like a VR headset, or perhaps augmented reality.
And it’s in this setting that I’d like to talk a little bit about this word: immersive technologies.
This trend to use technologies like virtual and augmented reality to immerse, that’s part of the wording, immerse student experiences inside and with the media. So what is immersive technology?
This is the heart of the question that we want to get at in this short video.
Well, in my research, you can find more at erichawkinson.com; there are many different applications of immersive technologies.
But there’s a whole spectrum of media that we consider in this house of immersive technologies.
Augmented reality, mixed reality, virtual reality, and now we hear terms like spatial computing and even things like diminished reality, where we’re taking things out of the real world as we display them to people in virtual settings.
Think like a Black Mirror episode that you may have seen on Netflix.
So we have this range of technologies.
Virtual reality, where we take you, the learner, and put you into simulated environments.
Augmented reality, where we take simulated parts. Think like a Pikachu in a Pokemon Go, and bring them into your real world.
Mixed reality, where we’re doing a little bit of both and mixing them in various ways.
And now things like spatial computing and other terms.
XR is another one, extended reality that kind of combines all of these things put together.
So we take this suite of technology, this category of technologies plural, and we put them into learning contexts.
And that’s where we come down on this idea of immersive learning, immersive technology, and learning context.
And we know that there’s quite a bit of good and bad things about them.
Perhaps we’ll talk about those in later short videos in this series.
But one of the things that stands out, that makes it a little bit different than past mediums, that makes it a little bit more inside of the content.
You are part of the content. It’s part of your world and you are part of that world.
And it’s that interconnection where we’re blurring the lines between the real and the digital.
And this is where a lot of exciting things are happening, especially with teaching and learning moving towards the future.
