Dr. Fridolin Wild was part of an expert panel on ‘Separating hype from reality: AR/VR and learning’ at the education subconference of South by Southwest (SxSW) in Austin, Texas, on Monday, March 6, 2017.
Together with Dan Moller from The Mill, Linda Bush and Mark Christian from Pearson Education, the panel debated the pros and cons of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality for learning at one of the world’s largest edtech events (2016: 13,840 participants from 38 countries):
Analysts predict that the AR/VR market will hit $150 billion by 2020. Both have made a big entrance on the education scene. Schools, colleges and universities are getting the hard sell on making the investment in the “next big thing” that will transform learning for students by taking them on a field trip to the moon. But the reality is that AR/VR is nothing new. The first VR head mounted display was invented in 1960 and the term AR was coined in the 1990s, but its history goes back to the 1930s. It’s time to separate the hype from the reality and this panel of experts will do just that. Hear an academic, an artist and an edtech industry rep debate the pros and cons of AR/VR and learning.