for years education has stagnated every
day when students go to class they do
the same things that students have been
doing since the 1940s
they sit they listen to a lecture they
may be read they’ll work with their
partners and that’s about it but it’s
what we’ve been doing for for maybe the
past century and I have to ask myself
why has this not changed right so we
experience and we learn the most from
experiential experiences we we learn
with our senses and so why is it that we
are still weeding off of pages and we’re
still just watching lectures as opposed
to experiencing our education and turvy
are so the first time I had a VR headset
put on my head it was a it was it was
definitely memorable normally at this
point of VR talk the speaker will
comment on how incredible this VR
experience was and how it changed their
life forever my experience was very very
different for sure
I felt instantly sick it was really
grainy and the humans in this experience
did not look like humans it had
something that we call the uncanny
valley which is sort of just a really
creepy avatar that that makes you feel
like you want to puke for sure and so I
was still pretty curious about this
technology but I definitely was not
impressed yeah so I got more curious I
started doing more research I started
developing in VR I started playing video
games building video games and luckily
the VR scene sort of grew better
Hardware came out that her software came
out things were getting were improving
but at the same time things were moving
in a direction in which most mediums do
right it was an entertainment sort of
direction so we look at VR we think of
games movies but uh not too many people
thought beyond that about a year ago so
I thought about what could this medium
potentially mean for our education what
could this mean for
students who don’t like to sit in class
and read and who struggle to pay
attention in class but at the time it
was still not super not feasible but a
couple months more HTC vive releases a
room-scale
piece of technology and what that looks
like is it’s a VR headset where I could
walk there but I could be in a jungle so
I can experience an entirely new world
around me at this point I realized that
like VR is definitely something that
will change our education I got really
excited for context I selfishly work on
things that focus on education
accessibility and immersive technology
so to me this was a really awesome
opportunity to work on things that all
interested me and so I ended up starting
a company with a friend and it’s a
education via our company it’s an X our
company as well if you guys aren’t
familiar with the term XR it means
immersive reality and so that includes
all the R’s
AR vrm are definitely a very cool
industry but I have to say that the
thing that excites me the most is for
sure the education like I said earlier
we learn things through our senses so
it’s really difficult to understand why
it persists through kindergarten all the
way to college and post-secondary stuff
that we are still learning off pieces of
paper I don’t know about you but I don’t
I didn’t really learn much about like
Rome or become too impressed by just
reading about its architecture I feel
like I would have been far more
impressed if I went there and I did I
when I went to Rome I was far more
impressed I wanted to learn about it I
was curious but that experience was far
different to the experience that I got
sitting in class reading about it so in
education VR there are three types of
three types of different education so
there is vocational professional and K
through 12 so let’s start with
vocational so vocational looks sort of
like this you trained EMTs nurses
paramedics etc it’s an awesome industry
I think this was something that really
opened my eyes
to how VR could actually be accessible
so when you think of VR and when you
talk to schools the first thing that
comes to their mind is well it’s
expensive
well there’s technology how are we gonna
pay the thousands of dollars for this
well I ask you to consider what this
could mean for vocational schools so
here we have a clinical Sims environment
so it normally costs upwards of millions
of dollars to create an actual physical
lab at a school the cost that it would
cost for a school to build a virtual lab
that can be customized pour lesson and
changed as needed and used as needed
comes out to five to 10 K that’s
astounding
for schools in Canada which were a lot
of schools that we work with they don’t
have the budgets of larger American
private schools and this is to them this
was an awesome option we had plenty of
beta schools and they were excited about
it because they should be and I was
excited about it too because I was
always scared you know what what does it
mean when you have an awesome technology
but it isn’t accessible you know it
you’re working on something that you
know is out of reach for people so the
vocational aspect of it is definitely
one of my favorites because it means
that we can we can use technology in a
way that doesn’t exclude people but does
the opposite if anything it brings
people in so the second one we have
professional so here we have a surge in
training in VR the VR education
professional aspect of it is really
interesting to me because I think that
in the media a lot of people think that
VR is not a thing that will become large
it’s a fad but at the same time there’s
companies like Toyota and Ford that are
investing in VR they’re training their
employees in VR Walmart is actually
retraining all their employees for Black
Friday in VR it’s pretty funny yeah so
that’s part of it UPS is retraining all
of their drivers it’s definitely not
niche anymore I would say that for the
for the companies that have the money to
spend on this the see these are the
people and the players that are putting
all of their efforts into making this
comment
come true and then my favorite part
about K through 12 so my passion lies in
working with K through 12 students and
we are in immersive technologies and
here’s where the possibilities are truly
endless
so one begins to think about how you
learned in school I was really lucky I
went to a school that had a lot of
hands-on learning but I that was not the
norm
I had like a weekly course where I was
grabbing things touching things and that
to me was incredible like I at the time
I thought it was pretty boring but
looking at it now it made a massive
difference to me and so we think about
how and what this could mean for K
through 12 so for K through 12 this
means we can have our students walking
through realm so this is a room
experience pretty grainy up there but it
is full sized room experience students
can walk through jump on things have
dialogue with characters and it gives
them the autonomy to learn at their own
pace to have dialogue to feel like they
are in the experience and they are in
control of their own learning and to
have that autonomy at the ages of middle
school-aged elementary age this
encourages collaboration discovery it
encourages all the things we want our
students to learn so let’s think about
more things let’s think about students
that have attention disorders right so
one really nice thing about VR that I
did not anticipate in the beginning is
that it’s really good for students that
have ADHD the one thing about a VR
headset is that when you put it on you
can’t really see anything else so if
you’re in a juke a tional experience the
only thing you’re gonna see around you
is the educational experience and the
numbers talk you will find anywhere
between a sixty to eighty percent
retention rate increase in a K through
12 environment and to me that was like
absolutely astounding I never thought
that this would be something that could
help students that have learning
disorders but it is and that’s one of
the many many things that excites me
about the K through 12 area but I have a
video that I can show you and this is a
little bit wedding
what a middle-school Anatomy experience
[Music]
so that experience is actually really
cool you can pull apart this entire
model you can pull it apart with friends
you can look at the muscles it’s all
incredibly high fidelity and having
access to that as a middle schooler
would have been very cool students love
to take it apart put it back together
throw it around make new creations with
the muscles the autonomy that they have
during that is something that we’ve been
told encourages them to continue
learning because they’re not being hand
held to be clear I don’t think XR and
education is the answer to all of our
education woes I don’t think that I
don’t think I see a future where an
entire classroom is sitting in a headset
for six hours a day I don’t think
anything anything can replace the
amazing teachers that we had in the work
that they do
but I do see XR in education as a very
very powerful educational tool that we
should be taking advantage of to
supplement those amazing teachers who do
so much for us with that thank you and I
hope that you guys think about a feature
where VR and XR will will make education
accessible to everyone especially
experience so education anytime anywhere
thank you [Applause]
day when students go to class they do
the same things that students have been
doing since the 1940s
they sit they listen to a lecture they
may be read they’ll work with their
partners and that’s about it but it’s
what we’ve been doing for for maybe the
past century and I have to ask myself
why has this not changed right so we
experience and we learn the most from
experiential experiences we we learn
with our senses and so why is it that we
are still weeding off of pages and we’re
still just watching lectures as opposed
to experiencing our education and turvy
are so the first time I had a VR headset
put on my head it was a it was it was
definitely memorable normally at this
point of VR talk the speaker will
comment on how incredible this VR
experience was and how it changed their
life forever my experience was very very
different for sure
I felt instantly sick it was really
grainy and the humans in this experience
did not look like humans it had
something that we call the uncanny
valley which is sort of just a really
creepy avatar that that makes you feel
like you want to puke for sure and so I
was still pretty curious about this
technology but I definitely was not
impressed yeah so I got more curious I
started doing more research I started
developing in VR I started playing video
games building video games and luckily
the VR scene sort of grew better
Hardware came out that her software came
out things were getting were improving
but at the same time things were moving
in a direction in which most mediums do
right it was an entertainment sort of
direction so we look at VR we think of
games movies but uh not too many people
thought beyond that about a year ago so
I thought about what could this medium
potentially mean for our education what
could this mean for
students who don’t like to sit in class
and read and who struggle to pay
attention in class but at the time it
was still not super not feasible but a
couple months more HTC vive releases a
room-scale
piece of technology and what that looks
like is it’s a VR headset where I could
walk there but I could be in a jungle so
I can experience an entirely new world
around me at this point I realized that
like VR is definitely something that
will change our education I got really
excited for context I selfishly work on
things that focus on education
accessibility and immersive technology
so to me this was a really awesome
opportunity to work on things that all
interested me and so I ended up starting
a company with a friend and it’s a
education via our company it’s an X our
company as well if you guys aren’t
familiar with the term XR it means
immersive reality and so that includes
all the R’s
AR vrm are definitely a very cool
industry but I have to say that the
thing that excites me the most is for
sure the education like I said earlier
we learn things through our senses so
it’s really difficult to understand why
it persists through kindergarten all the
way to college and post-secondary stuff
that we are still learning off pieces of
paper I don’t know about you but I don’t
I didn’t really learn much about like
Rome or become too impressed by just
reading about its architecture I feel
like I would have been far more
impressed if I went there and I did I
when I went to Rome I was far more
impressed I wanted to learn about it I
was curious but that experience was far
different to the experience that I got
sitting in class reading about it so in
education VR there are three types of
three types of different education so
there is vocational professional and K
through 12 so let’s start with
vocational so vocational looks sort of
like this you trained EMTs nurses
paramedics etc it’s an awesome industry
I think this was something that really
opened my eyes
to how VR could actually be accessible
so when you think of VR and when you
talk to schools the first thing that
comes to their mind is well it’s
expensive
well there’s technology how are we gonna
pay the thousands of dollars for this
well I ask you to consider what this
could mean for vocational schools so
here we have a clinical Sims environment
so it normally costs upwards of millions
of dollars to create an actual physical
lab at a school the cost that it would
cost for a school to build a virtual lab
that can be customized pour lesson and
changed as needed and used as needed
comes out to five to 10 K that’s
astounding
for schools in Canada which were a lot
of schools that we work with they don’t
have the budgets of larger American
private schools and this is to them this
was an awesome option we had plenty of
beta schools and they were excited about
it because they should be and I was
excited about it too because I was
always scared you know what what does it
mean when you have an awesome technology
but it isn’t accessible you know it
you’re working on something that you
know is out of reach for people so the
vocational aspect of it is definitely
one of my favorites because it means
that we can we can use technology in a
way that doesn’t exclude people but does
the opposite if anything it brings
people in so the second one we have
professional so here we have a surge in
training in VR the VR education
professional aspect of it is really
interesting to me because I think that
in the media a lot of people think that
VR is not a thing that will become large
it’s a fad but at the same time there’s
companies like Toyota and Ford that are
investing in VR they’re training their
employees in VR Walmart is actually
retraining all their employees for Black
Friday in VR it’s pretty funny yeah so
that’s part of it UPS is retraining all
of their drivers it’s definitely not
niche anymore I would say that for the
for the companies that have the money to
spend on this the see these are the
people and the players that are putting
all of their efforts into making this
comment
come true and then my favorite part
about K through 12 so my passion lies in
working with K through 12 students and
we are in immersive technologies and
here’s where the possibilities are truly
endless
so one begins to think about how you
learned in school I was really lucky I
went to a school that had a lot of
hands-on learning but I that was not the
norm
I had like a weekly course where I was
grabbing things touching things and that
to me was incredible like I at the time
I thought it was pretty boring but
looking at it now it made a massive
difference to me and so we think about
how and what this could mean for K
through 12 so for K through 12 this
means we can have our students walking
through realm so this is a room
experience pretty grainy up there but it
is full sized room experience students
can walk through jump on things have
dialogue with characters and it gives
them the autonomy to learn at their own
pace to have dialogue to feel like they
are in the experience and they are in
control of their own learning and to
have that autonomy at the ages of middle
school-aged elementary age this
encourages collaboration discovery it
encourages all the things we want our
students to learn so let’s think about
more things let’s think about students
that have attention disorders right so
one really nice thing about VR that I
did not anticipate in the beginning is
that it’s really good for students that
have ADHD the one thing about a VR
headset is that when you put it on you
can’t really see anything else so if
you’re in a juke a tional experience the
only thing you’re gonna see around you
is the educational experience and the
numbers talk you will find anywhere
between a sixty to eighty percent
retention rate increase in a K through
12 environment and to me that was like
absolutely astounding I never thought
that this would be something that could
help students that have learning
disorders but it is and that’s one of
the many many things that excites me
about the K through 12 area but I have a
video that I can show you and this is a
little bit wedding
what a middle-school Anatomy experience
[Music]
so that experience is actually really
cool you can pull apart this entire
model you can pull it apart with friends
you can look at the muscles it’s all
incredibly high fidelity and having
access to that as a middle schooler
would have been very cool students love
to take it apart put it back together
throw it around make new creations with
the muscles the autonomy that they have
during that is something that we’ve been
told encourages them to continue
learning because they’re not being hand
held to be clear I don’t think XR and
education is the answer to all of our
education woes I don’t think that I
don’t think I see a future where an
entire classroom is sitting in a headset
for six hours a day I don’t think
anything anything can replace the
amazing teachers that we had in the work
that they do
but I do see XR in education as a very
very powerful educational tool that we
should be taking advantage of to
supplement those amazing teachers who do
so much for us with that thank you and I
hope that you guys think about a feature
where VR and XR will will make education
accessible to everyone especially
experience so education anytime anywhere
thank you [Applause]
Please follow and like us: