What have we been up to at Edify?

You may have heard the phrase ‘Metaverse’ being used increasingly often lately. But what is the Metaverse? And why does it matter so much?

Chances are you’ve seen and used Augmented Reality (AR) apps without knowing that you have: from Pokémon Go to Google Maps overlays, from trying on clothes virtually to measuring objects, smartphones have been using AR for quite some time now.

Since the beginning, Edify has been about learning without limits.

Teaching about the Mayan Empire? Put your students on top of a jungle pyramid mid-ritual in 760CE. The Vikings?

In this edition of Edify’s Fireside Chat, we were joined by Dr Imants Latkovskis, research assistant at the University of Glasgow’s Advanced Research Centre (ARC) and Sarune Savickaite, PhD student at the University of Glasgow’s School of Psychology and Neuroscience.

Virtual Reality offers a wealth of possible new ways for people to meet and communicate, both for work and for leisure. VR technology has revolutionary potential for a variety of sectors and settings, enabling people from around the world to meet and communicate – particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic which has seen travel and face-to-face meeting become harder (if not impossible) for so many. In many ways, VR’s greatest strength is its immersiveness: it’s much easier to communicate in an immersive 3D virtual environment where you can move around and feel like you are talking to people in a room than it is to face the static grids of faces we’ve all become so familiar with over the past few years. But one barrier to immersive technology like VR is the Uncanny Valley.