Mixed Reality in Education: boosting students’ learning experience

What if students could learn History by visiting stunning ancient ruins in Greece or significant war sites in Vietnam, together with their teacher, without leaving the classroom? With Mixed Reality (MR) this is possible, providing an immersive and more effective learning experience to children and young students. Let’s see how.

Learning by doing: MR can simplify the teaching of any subject

There aretwo ways Mixed Reality can be used in the classroom. The first is more traditional, it involves a desktop set up in which students explore a virtual environment using computer, keyboard, mouse, or some other input device, for example a wireless controller: this is properly defined asVirtual Reality.
The second iswhat today we use to identify as actual MR: it is the fully immersive experience that requires students to wearan HMD(head mounted display) andmotion controller, through which they can interact with an environment produced by a mix of real and virtual worlds, where physical and digital objects co-exist.
Thanks to this Mixed Reality,students can touch and manipulate objectsgenerating a greater understanding of them, and it this doesn’t stop here.Students can also interact with data sets, complex formulae and abstract concepts通过老师的口头指示可能更难理解。For many students, in fact, learning by doing is easier than learning by listening.
This second kind of Mixed Reality provides amore engaging, fun and effective learningexperience than the first one and, it goes without saying, than all the other traditional educational methods.And this is true for any subject:

Hard Science
Biology, anatomy, geology, astronomy. Subjects like these – traditionally considered as the most complicated – gain new learning opportunities thanks to the interaction with dimensional objects, human bodies, animals and environments.

Social Studies
Many classes around the world have already experimented MR tools to design architectural models, to recreate historical or natural sites, to explore foreign Countries and get in touch with new, different cultures. Topics related to literature or economics finally became “real” and “touchable” thanks to the deeply immersive sense of place and time, provided by Mixed Reality devices.

Art and Creativity
MR增强了学生、教师和外部教育者之间的合作，提供了远程合作的可能性。让我们想象一下，一位艺术家邀请他工作室里的一个班来参加一个特别的工作坊，一位策展人在博物馆里引导数千名孩子，或者一位演员与来自世界各地的学生实时领导一个大师班，让他们合作完成一件普通的戏剧作品。

Benefits of Mixed Reality in the classroom

Mixed Reality gives professional educators new innovative possibilities to explore with learners thanks to its features:

• Engaging:direct experience generate an effective way to captivate those students who struggle, or it can just provide another opportunity to boost the engagement during lessons at school.
• Universal:regardless of social, economic or geographic disparities, MR at school brings together people and encourage human interaction.
• All-purpose:as said before, Mixed Reality can be used to teach any topic, because it is easier to see and hear something instead of having it explained, above all with abstract concepts.
• Faraway worlds:using MR devices, students and teachers can go back in time, interacting with objects, animals or human beings that are no longer existing: dinosaurs and primitives get a new, more realistic image in learners’ minds.

No geographical limitations:it is not always simple to plan the perfect school trip. Students’ safety, as well as school’s budget, often affect the range of choices when it is time to decide where to go. Thanks to MR, the class has no more limits. Having a walk on a ziggurat in Chichén Itzá, as well as diving down over the coral reef, is now possible whenever we like.

Acer Windows Mixed Reality Solution

Based on the Windows MR application platform,Acer Mixed Reality Headsetwill blend real-world and virtual content to create compelling interactive experiences. It works right out of the box and no room setup is required.
By targeting a large variety of PC specs and thanks to 6 Degree of Freedom positional,Acer Windows Mixed Reality solutionwill let users walk in the available virtual space. While, to cover long distance, users will use teleportation.

Live experience of Mixed Reality

Virtual and Mixed Realityhas been one of the main topics discussed and explored at“Next Generation Learning”during theAcer EMEA Education Solution Centre Summitthat took place in Barcelona on May 17th – 18th.
Exploring the latest technologies that are entering the world of Education, our Education Partners had the honour to experience live new ways of making the wholeclassroom experience more engaging, byinteracting with hologramsthanks toMicrosoft HoloLens(as you can see in the video above).
Here’s a video from those amazing moments: