Could students and trainees gain something real from a classroom in the cloud?
A living lab’ for technology
As the metaverse grows, AI will improve as companies gather more data, says Almirall, increasing the number of its applications.
“The metaverse is the ideal place for the development of these technologies becoming a real living lab,” he says. “With more sophisticated tech the metaverse will be able to develop thanks to the abundance of data.”
For example, teachers and trainers will be able to see who is attentive and who isn’t by analysing micro-gestures and micro-interactions with AI.
Gisel Armando, the chief technology officer of Anything World, a metaverse startup, says education in a virtual environment could be limitless in comparison to traditional approaches.
“We could be wearing haptic suits that allow us to move our bodies like we would normally but in a virtual environment, and without location or physical constraints,” he says. “Just think of the possibilities. You could learn to do ER, firefighting, skiing, etc from anywhere/time in the world and in a safe way.”
There are even ways to make the environment feel “real world”: “The ‘classroom’ could be a lakeside campsite, the dynamic asynchronous and the content taught in novel ways,” says Armando. Or for jobs, the “classroom” could be your workplace.
Metaverse in the mainstream
While Meta insists the metaverse will be completely mainstream in five to ten years, Almirall says there are a few hurdles before we get any classroom in the cloud — namely the tech we need to access the metaverse and the tech companies creating it.
“The metaverse as we imagine it is not going to become real until we have affordable, really good glasses with high resolution and batteries that last long enough,” he says. “Regarding Apple, some tend to think that they are not going to release the Apple Glasses until they don’t have their own version of the metaverse, reproducing the iPhone model that made them so successful.”
But others are more optimistic about multiple metaverses and what it means for how we learn and work.
