There are so many VR headsets on the market these days, however, my son only wanted one the Oculus Quest. Now at first when he told me he wanted a $300.00 birthday gift, I was taken aback. He wasn’t even a teenager yet! If that were the case it would make sense to ask for a gift with such a high price point. So I decided to do a little research on my own to see some ways it could be used, mostly by me 🙂 ha ha I’m just kidding. I mean a virtural reality headset is a pretty cool thing to have in your home, even if your not sure what you can do with it.
So I decided in that moment that I would have my son write a paper about how he could use the Quest with homeschooling. After doing my own research, I discovered that it was being used in a lot of different areas of scope for different reasons. I knew my son would have to earn anything with a $300.00 price point as that’s a lot for most families and for any one child’s birthday gift. So after giving my son the assignment I let him hit the internet and start his research. He did so and I will now talk about somethings he learned and wrote about in his paper.
First, he talked about how it is being used in the medical field to practice procedures. immersive VR has been used to practice surgical training. This has shown to decrease injury, increase the speed of operations which improves the overall medical outcome for the patients. To read more on this please see this article writing by the National Library of Medicine (NIH) Virtual reality and the transformation of medical education. My son than explained that not only is this life changing but can saves lives as well. The second thing he talked about was language emersion for learning a foreign language. This would come in handy when we travel. You see I’ve always taught my children when your homeschooled the world is your classroom.
Here are 5 language apps that can be used on the Quest:
1. Immerse: Focuses on conversational fluency through live classes with native speakers, AI-powered scenarios, and community practice.
Link:
2. Mondly VR: It offers 30 languages with daily lessons to practice speaking, and conversational, travel based scenarios (e.g. taxi rides, restaurants)
Link:
3. Dynamic Languages: Provides 360-degreee video tours for immersive culture and language training in Spanish, Japanese, and others.
Link:
4. Spatial Lingo: Uses mixed reality to overlay translations onto real-world objects in your room.
Link:
5. Noun Town: A gamified experience where you learn works by interacting with items in a virtual world; items change color as you learn them.
Link: