University to Metaversity

The emergence of XR –devices and the 3D metaverse today can match and even exceed the respective societal impacts of the smartphone and 2D Internet years back. The higher education Metaverse is about creating immersive learning experiences. Soon, students will be attending the Metaversity.

A treat that is enabled by 5G networks is novel metaverse applications and a shift in consumer behaviour. Experts say, Metaverse is a hype, created by the tech giants including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple. The way that companies like Google and Facebook exploit people’s data should at least raise some questions about whether that’s going to go smoothly.

The Metaverse requires a powerful, fast network. And here is where 5G becomes relevant for higher education institutions. Powerful 5G network technology with its low-latency, and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) will play a paramount role in the efficiency of the Metaverse experience.

Metaversity is an immersive virtual reality platform where remote faculty and students don VR headsets and meet synchronously as they would on a physical campus. In some cases, the virtual campus is a digital replica of the institution in which they are enrolled.

Metaversity proponents say that VR boosts student engagement, achievement and satisfaction. But some scholars are concerned that the private companies that license the technology may prioritize their bottom lines over academic freedom, exploit students’ data or reproduce possibly biased narratives in an immersive format that becomes students’ go-to representation of events.

The Metaversity is a university immersive environment which combines VR and AR technologies, a Digital Twin of a physical campus, and where students and faculty can interact with each other via their Digital Twin, a digital representation of themselves. The Metaversity-vision will enable universities to scale and teach billions globally, offering all the regular benefits but at a fraction of the price.

The metaverse also removes spatial barriers! No matter where you are as a learner, you can step into immersive worlds for any learning purpose. Often, these have spatial persistence, i.e., learners and teachers from around the world can manipulate and walk around the same set of objects. And when they come back the next day, that content is still in place. That works both for VR and AR enabled metaverses.

Going forward, there will be a high demand for transformational leaders. It is in today’s higher education institutions’ hands to prepare such leaders using the latest education technology, and that means to embrace new technologies such as the Metaverse and to move the physical campus to the Metaversity.

Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, President & CEO, VARINDIA