“The fundamental problem is that teachers rely on others to develop immersive content. said Kaushal Kumar Bhagat. indianexpress.com in a video interview.

Bhagat and a team of researchers realized that online classes lacked interaction during the pandemic and came up with the idea to develop a no-code 360-degree VR platform for teachers.

“What is the guarantee that students actually see the videos and understand the concepts?” he asks, citing how online classes are lecture-heavy, sometimes repetitive, and focus on creating a collaborative learning environment. I emphasized that there is no

Bhagat is an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. (Image credit: Kaushal Kumar Bhagat/Linkedin)

For Bhagat, VR has the potential to make learning more interactive and immersive through computer-generated graphics in a three-dimensional environment. This is a better medium for solving complex concepts than reading or listening to them.

But designing content for 360-degree experiences requires a lot of resources, manpower, highly configured workstations, and access to thousands of high-end VR headsets. From the outset, New Delhi’s Bhagat, who leads the project funded by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and the Commonwealth Educational Media Center for Asia (CEMCA), wanted to simplify the process.

It took 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 great thing about this platform is that it requires no prior coding knowledge, making it easy to create new content, often in less than 30 minutes.

“It takes hours to develop an immersive VR experience, but for educational purposes, 360-degree VR content should be easy to develop,” he said.

Virtual reality (VR) is a term used to describe three-dimensional computer-generated environments. (Image credit: Anuj Bhatia/Indian Express)

There are no prerequisite skills required to develop VR content. All you need to do is take a photo in 360 and follow the instructions to create a lesson that you can experience in VR. Teachers can add audio, create quizzes, and incorporate gamification elements to make lessons more interesting.

The platform was designed for Android, but it can also run on your desktop. The increasing penetration of smartphones in remote parts of the country and the availability of affordable mobile VR headsets such as Google Cardboard allow students to visualize concepts being taught in schools. . “The degree of immersion depends on her VR headset in use, but the idea has always been to make VR accessible so that students in rural India can experience it first-hand. ”

Mr. Bhagat recently conducted a two-day workshop at the Community Education Institute in Bhubaneswar, Orissa to train school teachers on how to create immersive educational content using the 360 ​​VR educator platform. Similar workshops have been conducted in Cutak and Malaysia in the past. 360 VR Educator is already supported by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT).

The next step for Bhagat is to bring the 360 ​​VR Educator platform out of India. The project is funded by COL, which has 54 member countries, so the platform can empower teachers and offer them new ways to bridge the gap between theory and practice using VR.