Okay, so we’ve been talking about immersive technology and the benefits, the drawbacks, the risks, the challenges and the overall ways that people are starting to implement these technologies like we’re doing here in Kyoto, Japan through my various platforms like the My Hometown Project and Reality Labo.
As we look towards the future of these technologies, I am very optimistic.
I think these technologies have a lot of promise for democratizing a lot of what we have to offer as far as being able to experience the world, share our cultures and realities, being able to experience new ways of viewing the world, sharing new ways of thinking about things like never before.
For example, in our My Hometown Project, where students are sharing their experiences growing up in virtual reality and now we’re having people and students not even just studying immersive technology, but wanting to know more about the world and relate to each other.
We have more empathetic relationships with each other because they get to step into, for example, you’re from Italy and you get to step into the shoes of somebody that grew up in some small town in Japan and feel what that’s like.
Walk around and see what it’s like to be in that area. Hear stories and look around as they would in those areas.
There’s a lot of Rapport building, a lot of intimacy that happens using those technologies.
And moving towards the future, if we’re careful enough and we have enough things like open educational resources, we have enough open-access platforms to allow teachers and institutions and universities and small companies like mine at togetherlearning.com, where we might be able to have this more accessible and have this kind of an amplification effect for opportunities, for new ways of learning and sharing information all over the world.
There are some possible ways this could go wrong. We have AI just around the corner that’s being amplified.
It kind of is showing a great promise when connected to immersive technologies in the way of building new worlds through prompting and automatic generative AI, using GenAI for things like world building, asset building, and building curriculum on top of things like a digital twin moving towards the future.
How that works, as far as things around the corner, as far as copyright law, the teachers and administrators and universities who has the rights and abilities to use them.
And not only that, students that participate in these worlds and how their data is collected and used to soak in data with AI.
Because think now, you using a text-based chatbot with AI knows everything you put into that chatbot.
You connect that to your AI systems, now this AI knows how you move your body, how you move your head, what you say, what you look at, how much attention you pay, and where you gaze your eyes.
All that stuff can be exacerbated and might be problematic moving towards the future.
So I’m very optimistic moving towards the future about some of these technologies but we do have some hurdles, some challenges around the corner that we have to navigate a little carefully if we want this to go the right way for especially teachers and students.
If you’re interested in seeing more about what I am personally doing in the research and projects created and connected to these things and talking about these specific topics about how we’re going to navigate this around the future, I invite you to come to my personal website at erichawkinson.com or our learning platform at togetherlearning.com
to see how I and my colleagues are using this technology moving towards the future.
Again, my name’s Eric. Thanks for watching these videos.
I hope to see you again in the metaverse!
