I’ve noticed that for the last few weeks I’ve sticked to WATCH or TRY options, so to switch things up, I went with the LISTEN option for this week. Our ‘mission’ was to listen to one of the Voice of VR podcast episode, specifically #445: Shauna Heller on VR in Education, Medicine, & Enterprise. I’ll leave the link below for easy access.
The podcast was better than I thought it would be. As most technological subjects are pretty dry if I’m being honest, I figured that the Podcast version wouldn’t be much better, if not worse. Yet, to my surprise, they had some interesting things to say. Shauna Heller is the CEO of Clay Parks VR, Virtual and augmented reality strategy and executive direction for corporations, brands, institutions & developers. She has been in the industry for a few decades, and are very knowledgeable – evidently from the company that she started- about the subject matter.
The talk with Shauna Heller about here thoughts about non-entertainment and non-gaming VR content in education, medicine, and enterprise applications. Shauna said that she sees lots of growth in the future of VR in the next few years, applicable in all industries , from the corporate office to the classroom. The immersive experience of VR will bring alot more to the table than the traditional 2D method, allowing us to do things that we can’t even imagine at the momment. This will be the breakthrough of humanity, bringing us to the next stage.
She also mentioned that a good way to start creating in VR would be creating betas, and applying the AB method. For example, the school community wanted to created a Virtual Learning space to supplement / replace the traditional schooling system. So they created a virtual classroom beta, with group A consist of students taking lessons the traditional way (in the classroom, lectures, etcs) and group B consist of students learning through Virtual Reality. Within a controlled period, anywhere frpm 3 month – 2 years, we will see very clear if things work out. Most testing usually won’t go past 2 years, withe average of about a 6 months.
One other interesting question that she brought up was how could we use VR to turn complex problems(whether through visualization or spatial audio ) into simple concepts that people could get right away? We have seen application of this concept in Body VR, application tried on one of the Workshop, Google Earth VR, the Blu VR, etc. This has tremendous potentials for educational, explorational and enhancing creativity as it provide an immersive context of the subject matter. Like it’s better to learn Spanish in Mexico City than in New York City, i bet it’s much better to learn complex medical model in VR than visualizing it in your head.
As the conluding statment, Shauna Heller left us all with an inspiring message that I just want to quote here:
“It’s an honor and a privilege to be a part of it. For many of us who are passionate about this, it feel like a force greater than all of us individually moving us forward through this time, and if I can leave us message in a bottle that we can look back in time, is that we are at the dawn of something incredible, that will fundamentally change the way we learn, live, and interact with one another, how to find personal success and achievements in ways we didn’t know, we will have fun in ways we didn’t know, share with our family in ways we didn’t know , look at the past in ways we couldn’t phantom right now, look at the future in ways we can’t phantom right now.”
About:
Speaker’s Contact:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/shauna-heller-7a504a4/
Link to the podcast:
http://voicesofvr.com/446-shauna-heller-on-vr-in-education-medicine-enterprise/
Virtuoso Journal 