VR and AR Adoption in Higher Education Will Continue to Grow
What does the future look like for experiential technologies in higher education? Hoffman says the first step is to define what the future is. The futures framework defines the future as 10 years from now, as major changes can happen over the course of a decade, and it’s just far enough out to help researchers think outside the box when developing potential scenarios. There are four possible scenarios Hoffman and his team are using when considering the future of VR, AR and XR in higher education.
“The first one is very static,” Hoffman says, indicating that in this scenario, there won’t be much change. “There are too many obstacles to broad adoption. We’ll just continue to see what we’re seeing now. We’ve got some leading-edge people dabbling, but it doesn’t really go beyond that.”
The second and third scenarios predict incremental change: The second scenario involves low levels of disruption, and the third involves high disruption.
“We do see an increase in the use of XR technologies, but there’s still a lot of stabilizing effects,” Hoffman says. “Cost is still an issue. We need to pay attention to our students’ data and how it is used in this these systems.”
The fourth scenario predicts abrupt change — like another pandemic, for instance — that requires the widespread adoption of the technology quickly.
READ MORE: Muhsinah Morris is leading Morehouse College into the metaverse.
Which scenario does Hoffman think is most likely?
“I’m an in-the-middle-of-the-road person,” he says. “I think it’s going to be kind of an incremental change, but I’m optimistic also. I think there will be some real disruption in higher education. That’s what I hope happens.”
Still, health, safety and accessibility should be addressed before immersive technologies become a requirement in the classroom and beyond.
“We want to make sure that people are using them in a safe environment,” Hoffman says. “Accessibility is a huge issue. We need to make sure that people who have visual or auditory impairments or different ranges of abilities can leverage these experiences for their education or research goals, so that we’re not leaving people out. Also, the technology is still expensive, it is still specialized, so we don’t we don’t want to leave people out.”
Security and privacy are also concerns, he says.
“We need to focus on issues with these technologies related to personal privacy and the huge amounts of data that can be gathered by a VR headset,” Hoffman says. “Consider the number of cameras that are capturing visuals of our body, of the spaces that we’re in. Different groups are trying to develop the first security policies for these kinds of devices and technologies. Those are going to help to slow the broad adoption in higher education contexts.”