Feb 2018 v01 online

all kinds to foster muscle memory, simulate
difficult scenarios and illustrate hard-tounderstand
concepts in a virtual setting,
removing all of the danger and most of the
cost. For children, learning in a virtual
landscape is becoming more and more
commonplace, and the classroom becomes
a much more exciting place when students
can be engaged with augmented and virtual
reality. One of the newest commercial
enterprises in VR education has been
Google Expeditions, “a virtual reality
teaching tool that lets you lead or join
immersive virtual trips all over the world —
get up close with historical landmarks, dive
underwater with sharks, even visit outer
space! Built for the classroom and small
group use, Google Expeditions allows a
teacher acting as a “guide” to lead
classroom-sized groups of “explorers”
through collections of 360° and 3D images
while pointing out interesting sights along
the way.”
A recent study has also highlighted the
direct benefits of incorporating simulations
and VR into K-12 classrooms, particularly
for helping children engage and
understand scientific lessons. It details the
so-far steady movement of these resources
from a “Nice to have” towards a “Can’t do
without” for teachers, mirroring what
potentially occurred in the years leading up
to the fictional setting of A.R.I.F., whereby
a simulated tutoring and companion
service had developed from what was likely
an expensive luxury to a socially supplied
need. Indeed, some of the anxieties around
the incorporation of A/VR technologies
into classroom learning is that lack of
equality in access may mean that students
of schools with lower budgets or faculty not
amenable to new technological trends may
be disadvantaged, or that inconsistent
access will hamper the efficacy of the
technology in itself (like the internet; the
fewer people who use it, the less value it
has). These are both possible reasons as to
why social or educational authorities could
choose to distribute these resources across
the board, rather than allowing certain
families to receive privileged access.
Unlikely as government intervention like
this might seem, something comparable
occurred in 2016, when the UN officially
condemned internet access disruption as a
human rights violation, prompting some
governments to provide all citizens with
nationwide free wifi access. There’s no
telling which innovation will be the next
one deemed necessary for contemporary
human lifestyles.
Another function of the ARIF technology
was to act as an empathetic, reactive social