So this post is late, as I was on deployment from Alaska to North Carolina to provide more nursing hands in Red Cross Shelters after Hurricane Florence. I was reading the class readings on immersion virtual reality on the plane(s) on the way back. As I was reading found myself wondering a lot of things, but mostly would something like the immersion virtual reality help in training new shelter managers as we had found out Red Cross had had to use some folks who had never assisted in running a shelter as lead managers. Maybe something like immersion virtual reality would help in training, as books don't convey for many very well the chaos and non-ideal spaces that often need to be used to house folks after a disaster. But as I read Yap's article 'Google Cardboard for a K-12 Social Studies Module”, his mention of the View Master slide viewer as a precursor to the current immersive virtual reality devices, I wondered about other things. I grew up with a View Master, it is still the only way I have 'seen' Yellow Stone's Old Faithful going spouting. It set me to wondering, the new version of virtual reality being described allow the viewer to choose the angle and distance for viewing, and block out viewing of things in the 'real' reality. But like the View Master, don't immerse one in the virtual reality, in that sound, smell, touch and taste are still not included in the virtual reality. However they do give more depth to the visual part of the virtual reality. I can definitely see how they could help in the visual examples of exploring a zoo of animals or relational physics. Or visiting the La Lourve or Le Hermitage museums. Though having been to the last, missing out on sound would be missing part of the experience. On the other hand, visiting the caves in South Africa where the oldest hominid skeletons have been found, might be more profound in the new immersive virtual reality, as the program developer might be able to get permission to watch and actual dig or go back into the closed off parts of the cave where current work is being done and filming the skeletons in situ as they are being found, which a regular visitor couldn't do. All of which lead me to believe that for now immersive virtual reality is useful mostly for visual places that students can't get to, and probably not for training shelter managers, as a lot of the that learning would require the other five senses to 'see' the reality that you are trying to impart to the students as part of their learning.

Image – from https://www.flickr.com/photos/afagen/7127074889, accessed Oct 08, 2018, tagged in Google images as 'free to use or share'.