Virtual Reality (VR) was touted as the future of learning, however during the recent time the teachers have found themselves excluded from this ecosystem. A group of IIT Kharagpur researchers had in mind that this was a fundamental problem after they started working on developing a 360-degree VR educator platform.

HIGHLIGHTS
Researchers have developed a no-code 360-degree VR platform for teachers
VR has the potential to create learning more interactive and immersive
There was no necessity skills required to develop the VR content

Bhagat and a team of researchers have already had an idea of developing a no-code 360-degree VR platform for teachers during the pandemic once they realized that online classes have lacked interaction.

He had questioned underlining how online classes can be lecture-heavy and repetitive with no focus on the way to create a collaborative learning environment, “What was the guarantee that a student was basically probing via the video and understanding the concept.”

For Bhagat, VR has the potential to create learning more interactive and immersive through computer-generated graphics in a three-dimensional environment that could be a higher medium to solve complicated ideas than simply reading or hearing them.

But planning content for 360-degree experiences needs lots of resources, manpower, high configuration workstations along with an access to high-end VR headsets which would enter in thousands. From the starting, Bhagat who would lead the project that was funded by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA), New Delhi, needed to modify the method.

It had taken Bhagat and a team of researchers over 18 months to develop an open-source 360-degree VR platform specifically designed for teachers and educators. The good thing of the platform was such that it needs no previous information of coding, thus making it easy to make new content, usually in less than 30 mins.

There was no necessity skills required to develop the VR content. All they require was to shoot photos in 360-degree, follow the directions, and build a lesson which was ready to be experienced in VR. Teachers would be able to add audio, produce quizzes or bring in gamification parts to create the lesson interesting.

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