Written by Demond Cureton:
At VRARA’s Education Summit 2024, hundreds of professionals joined the audience for a massive showcase in immersive learning for major institutions across the world.
Hosted by Kris Kolo, Global Executive Director, VRARA, the event opened discussions across over 30 speakers to illustrate how emerging technologies have helped empower educators, faculties, learners, and vocational experts and their students.
Rob Pereira, Commercial Director, PICO XR, explored the benefits of using enterprise extended reality (XR) in the classroom.
One of the top three XR manufacturers in the world, PICO XR has supported educational partners from the European Union (EU), United Kingdom, United States, Middle East, India, Australia, and New Zealand, among others, with its enterprise solutions, he stated.
Pereira added that education remained a top industry vertical for PICO’s dedicated, standalone XR solutions with bespoke specifications for enterprises.
He noted use cases continued to proliferate across immersive learning, leading to novel teaching methods and delivering modules to classrooms, ranging from small schools to entire districts and governments, at scale.
Key factors considered when deploying XR devices were data protection, return on investment (ROI), and improving learner metrics, he explained.
Pereira told the audience about end user concerns,
“This usually involves large-scale planning and organisation. On the other hand, we have teachers and schools that are looking more at the day-to-day. They are looking into making complex technologies easier to grasp [and acquiring] training content, accessibility, hygiene, and managing classrooms.”
Pico also offered 360-degree solutions like software and content to form an ecosystem to support classrooms and end users, he said.
Additionally, for educators, external concerns involved receiving sufficient support during the developmental phase and reaching more students, Pereira noted, adding,
“We are only one part of the solution. We need to connect the content, training to management tools, and support systems to deliver full-scale solution that works for everyone. We [are] connected to many providers, people, and specialised solutions in this ecosystem for educators.”
Benefits of Pico XR Learning Solutions
Following the release of the budget-friendly Pico Neo 3 and flagship Pico 4 Ultra in May 2022 and September 2024, respectively, the ByteDance-owned headset manufacturer expanded MR tools for client use cases.
Both offered 6 degrees-of-flight (6DoF), hand tracking, and mobile device management (MDM) for small to large-scale deployments, with one case involving up to 3,000 connected headsets.
Explaining further, Pereira said that the devices were hygienic manageable and easily shareable for use in enterprise and school-based scenarios. They also allowed departments to deploy apps across headsets, browse the internet, and access 360-degree and YouTube videos, he continued.
Pico also provided its Business Suite software platform to facilitate “seamless classroom control, even in large groups with hundreds of students,” he stated, adding users could access modules offline where schools could not access or secure internet connections.
Continuing, he explained,
This dedication to building a secure enterprise ecosystem also means that we can provide enhanced API and SDK access. If you want to create better software and improve your current work, we can help and support you [with] global technical support through our distributed partners.
Regarding continuous support for end users, Pereira noted,
“We can also assign dedicated technical project managers to assist in developing your project at hand, making sure that every school, district, and partner receives the help they need.”
PICO Use Case Examples
In his presentation, Pereira addressed several highlighted use cases for the Pico enterprise platform, including:
VIL
In a use case in Germany, VIL utilised a holistic turnkey solution with Pico headsets, software, and a “very large content library” from third-party providers. It also featured high-security data protection and scalability to 2,500 devices.
Pico also provided additional MDM support to connect creative content libraries via a network of partners. A total of 3,000 on-demand devices were commissioned to schools for rapid shipping and deployment, making it the largest deployment of its kind in Europe.
Regional Training Centre (RTC)
RTC is a collection of 700 vocational schools and is headquartered in Flanders, Belgium. Rather than using a turnkey solution, the company aimed to create their ecosystem from scratch for greater flexibility.
Prior to the VIL project, RTC hosted the largest project in Europe at the time with 1,200 devices. Pico supported the firm through the entire process to facilitate with flexible solutions, data protection, and Pico 4 Enterprise headsets with next-gen mixed reality capabilities.
PHOTO: RTC Antwerpen
The organisation also selected ArborXR for device management and employed a large network of content providers for vocational content.
PRISMS VR
Based in San Francisco, California, PRISMS VR is a company that develops Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths (STEM)-based content for educators in the hopes of transforming the sector.
The company empowers students to understand complex concepts prior to employing traditional methods. The company is a full-service provider with over 10,000 headsets, which found successful rollouts with close collaboration with partner networks, Pereira told the audience.
He also noted that PRISMS will have the largest deployment of PICO 4 Ultra Enterprise headsets by the year’s end in the US and, potentially, the world.
The VRARA Best in EdTech, XR, AI event united hundreds of online attendees from across the virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (VR/ AR/ MR) industry for its Education Summit 2024 on Thursday, 19 September.
The Summit showcased dozens of use cases and testimonies across the education, training, and learning and development (L&D) sectors involving businesses, academia, researchers, and thought leaders.
Full Sail University, Arizona State University, Ohio State University, Yorkville University, and many others institutions shared their success stories on XR’s role in the contemporary classroom, leading to the digital transformation of learning and development (L&D).
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