VR has enormous potential to transform how we work, learn, communicate, and experience the world around us. This year, we’ve seen the VR community harness that power in exciting new ways, helping to bring people together and support the global exchange of ideas. To realize VR’s full potential, we’re working to better understand and fund the most impactful experiences.
One area we’re focused on is education research. Oculus Education is sponsoring research at several institutions to explore how VR enhances learning, beginning with studies at Cornell, MIT, and Yale. These projects will develop a range of VR experiences—from manipulating the inside of a cell in a high school biology class, to training doctors and health care professionals, to collaborating inside a virtual classroom—and measure their impact on engagement, retention, and application in real-world settings. Data-driven research will help us pinpoint the particular areas where VR can have the most impact.
We’re excited to continue unlocking the educational superpowers of VR and to share the results with the broader industry. We also want to ensure that the most effective experiences can be available to everyone, so Oculus and Facebook are working to bring VR to more people and expand the ways in which people interact in virtual environments. Today, we’re sharing some principles that guide our approach.
Designing VR Experiences with Safety in Mind
We want to deliver VR experiences that are safe and comfortable. It’s important to build responsive tools to discourage abuse in VR and social experiences. To keep people informed, we launched our Oculus Safety Center with guidance on important topics like how to set up new equipment, our comfort ratings, and tips for parents who want to know more about VR.