Students can now find Immerse’s educational virtual world, the first of its kind, on Meta’s VR app store.
The new partnership, which launched on June 23, allows learners to take part in virtual lessons in VR in a whole world built specifically for learning languages.
“The time had come for virtual reality and the metaverse to no longer be thought of as a small add-on to the classroom, but instead for platforms to go direct-to-consumer and disrupt schools head on,” said Quinn Taber, founder and CEO of Immerse.
Through a new membership plan, Immerse invites students into a virtual setting where they can schedule live Spanish classes, get peer-to-peer conversation practice and participate in community events.
“We are now on a mission to build the first thriving metaverse community that learns, teaches, and builds together”
The VR lessons are facilitated by an expert language guide, and conversation practice is available 24/7. It also claims to offer personalised feedback on linguistic development.
“We are now on a mission to build the first thriving metaverse community that learns, teaches, and builds together,” said Taber.
“VR language teaching and learning will be our starting place,” he added, hinting that there may be even more to come from the VR learning platform.
Immerse says that this partnership marks a new era in education VR, as most companies have, up until now, been seen as a “supplemental tool and add-on to the traditional classroom”.
The main goals for the new platform are to develop “best practices for immersive teaching and learning”, to build a “thriving virtual world community” that will hopefully one day “rival the likes of Rec Room, Roblox and VRChat”.
“After Facebook rebranded to Meta it became clear that the metaverse was going to fundamentally change how people work, play and learn,” Taber said.
“So our team began meeting with Meta’s teams, as well as with top social impact investors, to design a new virtual world built explicitly for a community of learners,” he went on to explain.
