THE (VR) GAMES PEOPLE PLAY

CAN VIRTUAL REALITY HELP IN DESIGN AND SERVICE WORK?

My experiences with interactive video games revolved around family. Stints playing the first shooter interactive game, which debuted Acclaim’s much anticipated motion capture technology, and many more hours playing the U-boat submarine game, were precursors to me considering how the technology could be used in an educational setting. Who knew where it would all lead. Thirteen years ago, my daughter and I started putting together a plumbing game that I could use in class to help teach Code. I created the building and plumbing from SketchUp while she created three avatars. One was a comical cartoon guy plumber, the second one was a geeky inspector, and finally the third one was a very intelligent girl named Miss Code. Anytime the inspector would fail the plumbing inspection, Mr. Plumber would call upon Miss Code who would appear to him in a hallucination and teach him the Code. It worked great in class, but we never got past the PowerPoint animation stage. I hoped that one day we might fully animate and make plumbing interactive.

Fast forward to 2023. Statista recently reported that despite being a relatively new industry, the virtual reality (VR) market is booming across the globe, including within the video gaming segment, which allows gamers to transport themselves to different worlds with the use of a VR headset. Global revenue within the VR gaming content industry is forecast to grow from US$1.8 billion in 2020 to US$6.9 billion by 2025.

As you can see, the VR gaming business is booming and the VR education business is just getting off the ground. Let’s look at how we educate through VR and AR. Currently at SAIT we are paying for the services of Interplay (an American digital education firm) to help instruct our apprentices on the electrical systems of gas appliances.

We have been able to incorporate some augmented reality into our cross connection lessons in fourth year, but they are not interactive. Mixed reality is still in the developmental stage.

So far VR has been very useful with universal themes, such as heating or electricity. However, it’s a little more difficult to acquire interactive plumbing as the Codes are different in Canada than in the U.S. We still use home-grown 3D to plan and teach plumbing codes in our shops.