Information Technology University of Lahore in Pakistan has launched the nation’s first virtual reality-based classes in the metaverse.
The new courses will imitate the traditional classroom experience via virtual reality headsets and motion tracking, according to a report from local Pakistani news outlet Samaa.
Per the report, ITU Lahore’s head of the computer sciences department, Ibrahim Ghaznavi, said ITU expects the initiative to improve the academic abilities of students participating in the metaverse experience.
Online courses began at the university in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the shift to metaverse technology comes as virtual reality applications for education have begun to find their footing throughout the globe.
Related: Metaverse for education: How virtual reality can help schools and colleges
The ITU Lahore program was reportedly developed in partnership with support from the University of Denmark. It may also take inspiration from the university’s spiritual alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
ITU Lahore was founded in 2012 with the stated intention of emulating MIT’s success in the field of technology and engineering. It has various partnerships with other noteworthy universities and corporations, including Harvard and IBM.
While the past decade has seen the rise of virtual, mixed and augmented reality headsets and support technologies, much of the early excitement surrounding the start of the metaverse era was dedicated to the gaming sector.
Unfortunately, as several aggregators such as Steam player counts and Oculus sales figures indicate, the metaverse hasn’t gripped gamers in quite the same way as the creatio of other transformative gaming technologies such as handheld consoles and cloud computing have.
However, recent analysis shows that the metaverse for industry, medicine, education and marketing is heating up, with many applications finding their way into consumer headsets and browsers.
Tim Berners-Lee, the person largely credited with creating the World Wide Web, recently predicted that spatial computing — displaying and operating computer applications in three-dimensional, augmented reality — was the future of the Web.
“You can go do things with a VR headset, and then when you take the VR headset off, you could do it with a huge screen,” Berners-Lee told CNBC in an interview, adding that multimodal support would be key to adoption. “Whenever you move, you can grab your phone and the experience will be as one. It should very smoothly go between different devices.”