Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) are major contemporary technologies being implemented in teaching today and are playing a role in the future of education.

The nature of AR/VR changes the way people interact in a learning environment, with many potential benefits in teaching. One of the most pressing challenges in education and training is to ensure that whatever is being taught, meets the audience’s learning needs. In today’s complex society, where new discoveries and technologies emerge regularly, learning needs are changing rapidly. In response, AR/VR can help educators adapt and refine solutions quickly.

The classroom

The AR/VR experience allows people to interact in a simulated scenario. Educators have found information retention improves when the individual is engaged in diverse multi-level.

Examples include visualising inherently abstract concepts in physics, engineering, mathematics, chemistry and biology, such as exploring geometric shapes in 3D, following signals through the nervous system, and seeing the behaviour of structures under different loads and environmental conditions.

AR/VR allows learners to explore scenarios that are difficult or dangerous to recreate in the classroom, such as the impact of combining hazardous chemicals, the behaviour of the heart during a cardiac arrest, welding training and monitoring lava flows and temperatures in an erupting volcano.

The Soldamatic welding simulator, which has won top honours at the Worlddidac Awards for the most innovative educational product, requires no costly welding consumables, is safe and reduces training time by half.

The Soldamatic can be used in a classroom environment with no need for special clothing or ventilation.  The welding can even be done in an office. It is 100% safe, simply because it provides a augmented-reality welding environment through the trainee welder’s headgear.

The work environment

There is also a range of possible VR applications in the work environment, such as demonstrating architectural models and testing factors such as human behaviour during emergencies.

And for advanced multi-sensory simulation of complex and dangerous tasks and activities – encompassing surgery, flying a supersonic jet, fixing a component on the outside of a spacecraft, through to rehearsing combat or disaster rescue scenarios.

As a result, AR/VR can be used to make abstract data more tangible to help workers understand information more deeply and promote a better decision-making process. The scope and scale of daily choices can be visualised more easily in VR.

Training can be done in situ, for example providing a VR overlay to guide a remote maintenance engineer through to the removal and repair of an aircraft engine part when the plane is 10,000 kilometers from its home base.