Tactility and the Metaverse

Check out this podcast with Jon Favreau interviewing angel tech investor, Matthew Ball, with a fascinating discussion about the ABCs of  the "Meta" concept, including a nice nod to the practical (or some may say, impractical) applications in the classroom.

What struck me is how the "Meta" movement dovetails so closely to my concept all along about teaching kids tech - the point isn't to learn a specific language, but to prepare young learners to embrace the "how and what if" mind. And so be it, that now "gamification" of most users' involvement with tech from your phone to smart technology in the home is the norm. And the podcast even points out: "75% of 9-12 year olds use a shared virtual 3D world at least 1x/week" (think Kodu, Tinkercad, Minecraft all things my blog and classroom sessions have covered over the years!).

In short, Matthew Ball explains that the metaverse is the internet in 3D that uses gaming infrastructure to communicate a virtual world. For example, depicting a virtual version of an airport layout to show folks safety options or how to get from one point to another interactively using a public touchscreen. Many associate "Meta" as virtual reality headset based (VR), but he explains, "Meta" is far from just that narrow definition.

Meta uses graphics based computing to do things such as how to show how if you have 18 people inside a room, to predict how that affects the environmental temp, humidity, etc. It essentially makes the physical world legible to software to improve our lives, such as defining energy efficiency to build 4D reality via 3D modeling.

As for education, which remember, we've discussed prior, where currently a teacher from 100 years ago could transport to a modern classroom (ha - is there a Meta answer to do that?), and see little difference in tools for how the basics are taught. Matthew Ball argues that Meta has the potential to disrupt the education space to reduce cost and increase who we reach. Increasing reach is a critical need we learned through COVID pandemic remote learning, where Meta addresses "tactility" to build virtual hands on and virtual "seeing" connections through personal avatars you "talk to/with" others in a shared immersed world that most kids now experience already and embrace in their weekly if not daily 3D gaming. Tactility keeps that basic hierarchy of needs to feel cared for and to belong, that 2 years of Zoom classroom encounters lacked leaving many kids, especially middle schoolers, out of loop and now behind the learning curve.

Click here to learn more about Matthew Ball and his metaverse primer.