Text/VR Gyro Pea
What do you think of when it comes to VR? VR offline experience stores in shopping malls, experience videos of popular VR games, watching movies with VR devices, or chatting with friends with "different shapes" on VRChat, etc.?
Source: LSToast
In fact, the first thing that comes to mind is apps like games, social networking, and movie watching. The main reason is that XR companies such as Meta are building a new generation of entertainment content ecology, entertainment applications are more popular, and they believe that games will be the key for most people to open the door to the virtual world.
In order to enable VR technology to empower more industries, many manufacturers continue to try to open up new directions, and VR education can be said to be a key area of focus. Especially in foreign language education, English is a widely used language in the international community, and English classes are also one of the compulsory courses in domestic K12.
Recently, THE VR English education platform Immerse received 1 billion yen (about 51 million yuan) in financing. The proceeds are said to be used to strengthen the team, innovate products and enable support for major VR platforms, and plans to launch Spanish courses this summer, followed by French, German, Japanese and Italian courses.
From looking at the blackboard whiteboard to watching the VR headset, what new experience will VR bring to the teaching of foreign languages outside the classroom?
The pandemic has spawned an online economy
Online education is the new normal
Affected by the epidemic, under the premise of not being able to complete the teaching tasks in school, most schools and educational institutions choose to ensure normal teaching order through online education. In this scenario, students can learn online at home through various online conferencing applications such as Zoom, Tencent Conferencing, DingTalk, and other platforms.
Image source: Zoom
At this stage, education has achieved a transformation from "looking at the blackboard" to "looking at the screen" under the acceleration of the epidemic. Although the teaching resources on the Internet are more abundant, for teachers and students, the effect of online teaching is more difficult to grasp than the actual classroom teaching, mainly due to the anxiety of teachers and students due to the epidemic, lack of interaction and communication, lack of practical operation guidance and other issues. In this environment, the demand for VR education has been created.
VR-enabled education is more interactive, the display effect is more vivid and interesting, and the teaching consumables can be saved through repeated courses and simulations, making high-risk teaching experiments safer, and providing some classroom implementation solutions that cannot be taught in reality.
In this way, compared with traditional classroom teaching and online live teaching, VR education has great prospects, and its characteristics such as immersion and safety are more advantageous. How is its market performance?
According to the statistics of Gyro Research Institute, the domestic VR/AR education and training market size in 2021 is 2.6 billion yuan, opening up a new market.
Source: Gyro Research Institute / VR Gyro
VR education has great potential and high demand, and china also attaches great importance to VR education, and many provinces have issued relevant policies in 2021. With the guidance and support of policies, more importantly, in VR education, whether it is K12, vocational education or higher education, teachers should also design customized courses while considering professional teaching, so that students can more easily accept the new form of teaching when wearing VR headsets.
In early April, Engage, a well-known VR education social platform, announced that it was partnering with VR education platform VictoryXR to launch 10 virtual universities in the United States, also known as "Metaversities." Starting this fall, some universities will open digital twin campuses built by VictoryXR on Engage XR's social VR platform.
It is understood that students will be able to explore its digital version of the campus and can participate in virtual classes in real time with other students without leaving home. These courses will cover all aspects of human anatomy, history and astronomy. Unlike traditional classrooms, virtual classrooms will leverage the advantages of technology to immerse students in their learning.
How to improve the effectiveness of foreign language teaching in the curriculum, extend the foreign language learning environment beyond the campus, and achieve innovative education, and now is the best time to start using immersive VR technology for language education.
A virtual world of foreign language learning at your fingertips
Current VR devices come in different forms, and people can choose different products according to their own needs, just like computers and mobile phones, affordable and easy-to-use VR devices are more suitable for educational environments.
Learn foreign languages in VR: 360° VR and immersive VR
If you want to experience the immersion in reality in the virtual world, there are generally two forms: one is to use a panoramic camera to shoot a real scene to make 360 ° VR education courseware, and the other is to use 3D modeling and other technologies to produce fully virtual scenes and content to produce VR education courseware (more expensive).
In the case of the ImmersiveMe app, for example, it allows students to be in another country, feel the local scenery or unique meeting scene, and students can also combine scenes and contexts to communicate with waiters in coffee shops and order food in full Spanish.
More than 3,000 interactive scenarios are currently available in 9 languages, including VR courses in German, Spanish, French, English, Japanese, Chinese, Italian, Greek, and Indonesian. Introducing beginner, intermediate and advanced courses for different groups of people, they practice foreign language conversations in different environments according to their own situation.
Overall, experiencing 360° VR feels akin to sitting in front of a giant screen and watching a video, with students acting more like an observer, being able to watch course videos and learn everyday conversations by listening to their words and pronouncing them according to text prompts. The process of dialogue has less interaction, the overall is more passive, and more emphasis is placed on "seeing" and "listening", but the cost of this courseware production is relatively low, and for students without VR equipment, the use of mobile phones or web pages can also learn these courses, but the sense of immersion will be greatly reduced.
Fully immersive VR, on the other hand, is best suited for active experiences. With the help of an immersive VR environment, students can move freely in a variety of scenes rather than passively confine themselves to a single place for dialogue, or simply greet their friends, and students will prefer to see their actions or attitudes reflected in the virtual world.
Immerse offers a whole new form of language learning that strengthens the connection between teachers and students, and for teachers, everything is controllable in a virtual environment.
Source: Immerse
It can be seen that in The Immerse, more importantly, face-to-face active communication, students and teachers can have their own avatars, (when the interaction permission is open) can pick up props in the virtual scene to promote communication, and when students are proficient in foreign language communication, they can also join the debate course.
Immersive VR foreign language education is relatively more focused on "speaking" and practical language skills training (for different time, space, situation, object).
Whether it's 360° VR or immersive VR, it provides a new way for people who want to learn a foreign language to interact with others anytime, anywhere, not only VR, but also more teaching methods in the future, creating new opportunities to improve people's forms of connection, social interaction and dialogue.
Fun is the key to learning a vr foreign language
After-class daily communication is also very important, many VR users will use VRChat as a "foreign language corner" in the virtual world that can communicate freely, and people who use different languages will also build corresponding language communities, such as "VRChat Chinese bar" and so on.
Many people will face scene anxiety, as well as the general lack of confidence in foreign language beginners, which will even directly affect them to reduce or give up face-to-face communication, but in a completely virtual space, the scene and the character image are virtual, to a certain extent, will reduce the negative impact of this anxious emotion, expression can be more free and relaxed.
In this more interesting communication environment, many VR users have not only made foreign friends in VRChat without professional guidance, but also have a certain improvement in their foreign language oral expression ability.
Dylan Walch, a VR engineer at Immerse, said: "VR is the only technology that can truly enable immersive experiences. In VR, if you are asked to give a speech in a conference room or on stage, it is equivalent to simulating your emotions and anxiety in a public speech. ”
Compared with the traditional single mode of learning foreign languages, which relies more on "listening to lectures", VR opens up diversified possibilities, and VR's remote collaboration, immersion and other characteristics are more advantageous, covering visual, auditory, and emotional, social and even tactile interactions. Effective combination of these elements, VR technology may be able to change the rules of remote foreign language learning.
It is not easy to break through the dimensional wall between the classroom and the virtual world
VR allows students from all over the world to gather in virtual classrooms where they can collaborate and learn with professional teachers anywhere, with little to no distraction.
In the future, the impact of the epidemic on educators and students will be even greater, how VR technology continues to empower traditional education courses, and how to customize more personalized courses for students deserves further study.
According to market research firm IndustryARC, the size of the education industry is expected to reach $22.4 billion by 2027, growing at a COMPOUND annual growth rate of 14.6% during the forecast period for 2022-2027.
Although the VR education market has a good outlook, problems such as data security, privacy issues, high equipment costs, and difficult application operations have hindered its rapid market growth. It is not easy to break through the dimensional wall between the classroom and the virtual world, and to solve the problem of popularizing vr, it is also necessary to rely on the development of the upstream and downstream of the industry, reduce equipment costs, enhance application experience, build content ecology, and provide support for developers.