Playing with Virtual Reality

 I was lucky enough to be able to borrow a Meta Quest 2 headset from the tech integrationist at our high school. He gave me a quick introductory lesson on how to use it. He walked me through the menus and showed me how to exit out of the different apps. He explained to me that I was getting the full menu of what is available, while a student would only see the space that he had assigned them to be. He explained that the accounts he has are generic school accounts and not linked to any student's personal information. I was reassured to know that privacy and security for students does not need to be a concern. 

This morning, I set aside a couple hours to "play". Since I forgot the charger at school, a couple hours was all that I could do. I had the chance to try out quite a few of the apps. I was looking for the apps that would be most useful to me in a classroom. I explored one travel app, thinking that a virtual field trip would be fun. I was not as impressed as I expected to be. The photos looked fuzzy to me. I don't know if that is just my 47 year old eyes. I am definitely on the verge of needing reading glasses. It just seemed like the attempt to make photographs appear 3-dimensional resulted in a fuzzy quality, at least to my vision. I was also surprised by how quickly I started to get a mild headache from looking at the images. 

I attempted a VR parking program that is used by the driver's ed class but I wasn't able to get it to work. My troubleshooting skills are not great with this technology yet. I also wasn't able to get Beat Saber to work, so I'm still not clear about what it even does. I got into the app but it wouldn't let me choose from the menu for some reason. 

Many of the apps seemed no different to me than showing an educational video. I started one about Anne Frank, which seemed to just be a movie screen in front of you. It was probably a very good video but I wasn't sure why you would want to watch it with a headset and not just on a tv. I stopped it after a few minutes to try something else.

The roller coaster was kind of fun, though it did make me a little queasy. There were a variety of cooking and foreign language apps that might be fun to explore.

I ran out of time to check out other apps and know that there is so much more to explore. I came across this video shortly after my exploration though and I was able to connect with it.