Virtual Reality as a platform for educational purposes is one area that has been explored for over 30 years now.

NASA, Leading Medical Research Groups and even the Military have all used VR for years to simulate tasks and experiments that could otherwise be dangerous or costly to replicate in the real world. VR for Education has been limited in the past to those type of large well-funded institutions as the equipment required to provide VR experiences was extremely costly.

With the current resurgence of Virtual Reality we are set to see this new medium take hold in classrooms throughout the world. Development studio Labster plan to provide Virtual Reality Labs where any type of experiment can be carried out in VR which has the benefit of being both safe and also extremely cost effective for any educational society.

One of the largest expenditures that any college faces each year is the purchase of new equipment and science materials for their labs where students are taught how to extract DNA or grow cultures for research. Costs of this nature can spiral upwards if experiments need to be repeated but utilizing the Labster software suite you can repeat experiments virtually as many times as you wish at no extra cost and you can even bring the lab home with you to do science experiments on your own VR kit if you have one available.

Labster partners with top universities and their leading faculty to create and develop innovative, scientifically advanced laboratories and have been creating Virtual labs since 2012 however only recently have they begun to programme Oculus Rift support into their software so now instead of viewing their labs on a standard 2D monitor you can now experience it inside Virtual Really. CTO of Labster Michael Bodekaer sent us an early VR build of their Cytogenetics lab to check out.

In this particular lab a young mother-to-be receives an abnormal ultrasound result. Students must find the underlying cause and inform the couple about possible outcomes of their unborn child and future children. In order to find the underlying cause, students need to perform an array CGH using an amniocentesis sample. Students learn the basic principles of array CGH and how to analyze their result.

Using Labstar’s software is extremely intuitive as you don’t need any keyboard or controller inputs. You just use the left mouse button to select an item and the right mouse button to go back to the work station selection screen which gives you an overview of the complete lab. The mouse pointer is locked to your direction of view but you can also fine tune its position by moving the mouse. This control scheme works really well and the mouse pointer looks to be about 2 feet away from your face which is just enough so it doesn’t bother you that much when looking around.

Also when viewing the lab in VR you will see two disembodied hands hovering where your real hands should be. When you click an item on the desk to use it your hands will go and grasp or hold the desired object or interact with lab equipment. Most of the interactions are completed with your Right hand as your left hand is holding an Ipad with instructions on what your next task is and also the theory about the current experiment. From time to time as you proceed through your experiment you are quizzed about the theory of the experiment with multiple choice questions which reinforces the lesson which is being taught.

The lab it’s self looks perfectly to scale and has a hyper realistic look and feel to it with all the lab equipment animated and rendered quite nicely. Some of the posters on the walls are a little low resolution which is noticeable in the Rift as the screen is magnified but this doesn’t detract in any way to the educational purpose of the software.

Michael also stated to us that from extensive user testing they found that letting students walk around the VR lab led to a large proportion feeling some kind of sim sickness after a time so they have fixed this issue by simply having a slight black out screen between transitions when going from work station to work station which is the best solution for now.

Overall Labster’s software is a shining example of what is possible when you bring Science lessons and Virtual Reality together. In the not too distant future we will see wide spread adoption of VR and this will surely spread to the classrooms just as computers did in the early 90s. Indeed the children of today will soon be learning in ways we could only dream about just a few short years ago and I’m confident that Labster will be there providing students with Virtual Labs and educating the next Marie Curie or even the next Heisenberg.

Visit Labster Here

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