VR/AR/E-Learning: Digital Market Capitalization Venturing Virtuality (Focus: Future Educational Applications in the Age of Exponentiality)
VR/AT technology will be the technical key driver for the next generation computer platform and e-learning. However, the market hype around this fascinating topic in exponential knowledge automation must be broken and brought down to the everyday ground of educational applications, which span finance, medicine, manufacturing and computerized learning/training systems. It is safe to assume that the educational sector can become an indirect ‘game winner’ and that it will not be the monetary revenue player in the ballpark of innovation, which is originally and naturally driven by entrepreneurial technology firms. Video games, live events, video entertainment, retail, real estate and military applications will be the material game changers, where greater disruptions of market segments will occur. Goldman Sachs (Equity Research, Profiles in Innovation, Report, January 13, 2016: p.7) estimates the value of the market ecosystem in VR/AR technology about $ 80 bn in 2025, which can be considered a conservative number for both, hardware and software products. The following companies will be greater game changers in the educational applications field: Immersive VR Education, Unimersiv, Google Expedition Pioneer Program, Alchemy VR, Discovery VR, zSpace, Curiscope, Woofbert VR, ThingLink, EON Reality, Gamar, Schell Games, Nearpod. Of course, government funding plays a great role in the education industry, and the economic focus is on creative VR/AR learning technologies, which will be cost effective and efficient. This cost effectivity and efficiency of future educational applications will mainly be about e-learning/training (virtual and augmented instruction), where real-world-costs (e.g. of surgery, security, customer and client services, military operations, intelligence gathering, educational field excursions and tours, expensive experiments, excellent teachers) can be curbed by serializing instruction, on the exact foundation of the scientific method. Such educational products can only be realized by a mixed tech-know-logical team of highly creative specialists, where the full dynamics of heuristic and algorithmic potentials of the educational task or problem is tested out in step-by-step procedures as the above-mentioned venture investment firms do, i.e. exponential education (e-learning/training/instruction) will become a social reality in the
next two or three decades, along with exponential medicine, finance and manufacturing. It becomes more than clear that the new HMD solutions are propelling the educational technology away from old platforms, which emerged in the new economy wave of the 1990s. The quantifications in the web of science (the formerly ISI web of knowledge) show, however, a significant dominance of clinical and behavioral research topics (also in education), where the disruptive disorder of this innovation profile and breakthrough still faces a tech-knowlogical barrier of creative team-work, which will transform the market ecosystem rapidly, once social diffusion starts. There is no doubt that the educational surplus value of VR/AR technology will be very high as the many industry projects in cost-efficient and effective vocational and professional learning/training demonstrate, e.g. social virtual learning (SVL) and social augmented learning (SAL) projects of the German Ministry of Education and Research. We can safely assume that educational technology will very soon reach a new electronic stage of learning, training and instruction.
Links https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/5554/the-impact-of-virtual-andaugmented-reality-on-individuals-and-society https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02086/full http://www.social-augmented-learning.de/
Stephen I. Ternyik