ENGAGE Launches ‘Link’ Metaverse Platform for Enterprise & Education

I’ve been engaged with e-learning for decades and was involved in the first rush to bring internet connectivity to schools in my country in the late 90s, with very lackluster success. Just throwing technology at education, hoping that useful concepts will emerge later isn’t working. We now had more than half a century of computer based training, and what we ended up with is blended learning, which is mostly video conferencing with online chat and forum software. Very far from the ideas of individualized courses and interactive training material reacting differently to each person that were the main argument for e-learning, because the tools to create content are not there, so most are stuck with Word or PowerPoint as fancy ways of writing text.

Training isn’t an area where you just build it, and then they will come. You need an actual concept how it will be used, otherwise you just create another thing that needs to be administered, usually without the funds to hire people to do that. That is a problem for VR in general, which so far is mostly used for games, which aren’t exactly productivity tools. Yes, there are always niches where it makes a lot of sense, and I have been involved in a number of (expensive) pilot projects. But unless you search and find something that makes a VR based solution so much more efficient than what we already have that it becomes worth the extra hassle, you haven’t found a convincing argument for it or proven that there may be a use case for the majority of people. And we are we seeing a move in the opposite direction: VR didn’t bring any real productivity tools or gains, so now we are turning it into yet another form of (video) telephone with Horizon Workrooms or Engage Link, to then claim it a success because it allows humans to communicate. Which is far from what the original promise was.

When 3D printers became affordable, everybody predicted they would change manufacturing and how we consume, and the media flooded us with lots of prosthetic hands that improved people’s lives. But this is an extreme niche use case, which didn’t translate at all to the broader public. You still need to learn designing with CAD software and handle the finicky print process, so it became a useful tool for a very small number of people that invested a lot of effort.

VR social spaces with specific purposes are similar: the real work begins after you have the space. And for that you either offer tools that really assist the potential users, meaning it would allow teachers to create individual learning spaces without first having to learn how to program, 3D model, animate, create video etc. Or you end up with another medium that only experts can handle, making it mostly useless for the broader public. Wikipedia is successful because it works, and it works because everybody can write, not because it uses the most fancy environment, while Engage starts with the shiny part of questionable use compared to what already exists, requiring extra work instead of offering productivity gains.

Me being still involved with e-learning and passionate about it is a sign that I believe it can be very useful, but you need to start with a sensible concept. Which is very hard, because so much knowhow is required to create media, and even more for educational material. And I don’t see a sustainable concept here.

Powerpoint is a big step up from Word, or it would be, if more people learned to use at least some of the slightly advanced features. I now regularly support/assist/consult trainers for adult second language learning with much higher budgets than schools. Those regularly participate in trainer courses for subjects like media theory, video editing or remote learning, and are basically all overwhelmed with the amount of tech. Sure, adding OBS could make remote teaching much more powerful, but if you already struggle to get people to turn on their microphones in Adobe Connect, adding another layer of complexity sounds more like a threat than an opportunity.

And this is still all on the presentation side, so it hasn’t even touched autonomous e-learning. I am a Unity VR developer and among others have created educational simulations for container handling for logistics students. Before I was a backend developer for database driven web applications for a long time. All this combined would allow to create a training application that not only explains the subject, but lets students experience it themselves, while observing them, suggesting to repeat certain tasks and providing hints what to do better or how others solved the problems.

The actual container port simulation took months to built, allowed driving trucks, train, ships and dedicated stackers and cranes for moving containers between them, but didn’t include a lot of extra feedback beyond the physics. The version that was employed at the end was running as a WebGL app in a web browser, because the targeted schools simply lacked VR equipment. And in retrospect I’m not sure that the simulation provided a higher educational value than two pages of text with a few diagrams.

There is no doubt a huge potential for education in VR. But there is also a huge potential for creating art with free apps like Krita or Gimp and the now very cheap color printers. If you first learn to draw. Despite doing this for a long time and technology no doubt becoming both better and easier to use, my hope that we will see that potential realized has shrunk significantly, because I see how much those that want to create contents for their students are overburdened with having to build most of it from the ground up.

Maybe we need something like the Dall-E or Midjourney AI based image creators for VR, where you just enter a few keywords and they create an image/environment based on what the model learned from seeing other pictures. The results may not be the best or fitting, and it may take a lot of attempts for something useable, but it allows anyone to “create” images with only the skills you’d also need to edit a Wikipedia entry.