Fisk University in Tennessee, United States has unveiled a new model of learning that allows students take a Black Experience history course inside a T-Mobile 5G powered VR reality campus.
In celebration of Black History Month in the US, college students at Fisk will take high school students from St. Vrain School District, 1,100 miles away in Colorado, on an exciting and immersive journey through time.
Dr Brandon Owens, professor at Fisk University said, “For the first time in history, high school students from Colorado can stand on Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama, guided by college students in Tennessee and celebrate the American civil rights movement together, all thanks to VR technology and the digital campus we use for education.”
The metaverse tour commences inside the virtual campus at Fisk, where students step back in time 180 years to tour the slave ship Amistad before jumping 130 years into the future and walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.
With the use of virtual reality, these students will experience some of the sounds and slavery of the African American journey from slavery to freedom in the USA, and honour a key moment in the American civil rights movement.
EVP of Advanced & Emerging Technologies at T-Mobile John Saw stated, “Previously, this type of high-bandwidth VR experience could only be possible with a high-quality WiFi connection. But now, a high capacity 5G network can bring speeds that are just as fast or faster than WiFi, and this capability is only going to get better as 5G continues to evolve.”
It’s not been long since its release but 5G is already transforming education with students at Fisk University using HTC VIVE’s wireless all-in-one headset, VIVE Focus 3, to learn inside the virtual campus developed by VictoryXR using the Unity real-time 3D platform.
The virtual reality campus runs on T-Mobile’s Ultra Capacity 5G network, providing low latency, high capacity and the required speed to run such bandwidth-intensive VR applications for a classroom of students at the same time. The experience provides students with high-definition graphical detail while also allowing making sure the entire class stays in synch.
Just as smartphone apps that were built on 4G networks revolutionized the mobile economy in ways nobody could have predicted, 5G is also transforming many industries today but its innovation is expected at a much larger and greater scale across all industries.
Isa Muhammad is a writer and video game journalist covering many aspects of entertainment media including the film industry. He's steadily writing his way to the sharp end of journalism and enjoys staying informed. If he's not reading, playing video games or catching up on his favourite TV series, then he's probably writing about them.
