Chengyan Xu

As the digitalization revolution becomes more and more important for reshaping and supporting the future societal transformation, and it plays an indispensable role in achieving most of the SDGs ¹. Many countries started to invest in developing technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), Additive manufacturing (3D printing), virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), or the Internet of Things (IoT). Compared to AI, 3D printing, or IoT which are the hottest topics at this time, VR and AR are not as much popular or well-known as the other technologies. This blog aims to introduce emerging technology: virtual reality and discuss what it can contribute to achieving SDGs.

What is virtual reality?

Virtual Reality (VR) is defined as “a computer-generated digital environment that can be interacted with as if that environment were real” ². As an emerging technology, it draws more and more attention from researchers from all kinds of fields. Therefore, its application has also extended to not only gaming and entertainment but also on, for example, data visualization, aviation or d riving stimulation, product prototyping, scientific researches, education, and digital health. The focus of this blog will be discussing how virtual reality can contribute to achieving sustainable development goals by tackling the problems related to health and welling (SDG 3) and quality education (SDG 4)

Virtual reality for education

Despite the progress we have achieved on increasing access and participation to education over the past years, there are still 262 million children out of school in 2017 ³. The distribution of education resources is still largely unequal across the world. More efforts are still needed to be able to provide a good learning environment, quality education and better outcomes for the full life cycle to everyone, especially for women, girls, and marginalized people in vulnerable settings ³. Virtual reality as an education tool might be helpful to tackle those problems quite efficiently mainly because of two reasons.

First, VR can provide education to students remotely. Because of the high flexibility or portability of VR applications, the same applications or teaching content can be replicated in any place at any time. Therefore, students can access knowledge at any point in time according to their demands or needs. Using this, high-quality education in developed countries such as Finland can be delivered to children who live in remote villages in Africa, for example. This can help to relieve the pressure of not having enough teachers and people from less developed areas can also have the ability to access high-quality education like children in developed countries. This redistribution of education resources can help to increase the possibility of access and participation in higher quality education.

Second, VR provides opportunities for immersive and interactable learning and teaching. The fully immersive environment, which can let students to “be” in somewhere without physically being there, can ensure a vivid and highly engaging learning environment for everyone. The interactable environment can also make learning and teaching more interesting and comprehensible. It can help enhance and deepen the knowledge they have learned in a virtual yet very realistic and interesting setting instead of a traditional classroom environment, which can be quite boring some times. And for some places where don’t even have classrooms (because of poverty, war, etc), VR can be a useful tool for effective teaching and learning.

Virtual reality for health and wellbeing

Over the past few years, there was considerable progress towards improving the health and wellbeing of people. However, like the education resources, there is at least half the global population does not have access to essential health services ⁴. Many families are still in danger of becoming or going back to extreme poverty because of illness. Efforts are still needed to work on those issues, VR might be able to provide opportunities for tackling those problems by providing new ways of treatment of some disease and by making health care resources accessible to more people.

The application of VR on the confrontation therapy to treat anxiety ⁵, phobia, eating disorders ⁶ and other cognitive diseases have been well investigated. VR provides new ways of treatment that cannot be easily done by conventional treatment. For example, using VR to treat acrophobia. Patients can be in a “dangerous” position (i.e. at the top floor of a skyscraper) without really become dangerous in VR, however, it is not so easy to be done in conventional treatment. As the technologies developing, VR can bring more opportunities for modern medicine and health care. For example, VR makes telecommunication and teleoperation possible. With this technology, doctors from the other side of the world could participate in discussions and operations together with local doctors. This is especially meaningful for the medical or health care system in less developed areas or regions. By doing this, the redistribution of medical resources becomes possible, and more and more people can have the ability to access better medical and health care and, ultimately, to promote health and wellbeing.

Conclusion

VR as an emerging and indispensable technology for the digitalization revolution, it plays an important role in helping achieve many SDGs. This blog discussed its contributions to two aspects: education and health and wellbeing in detail and showed that VR technology is a very useful tool to help achieve that everyone can have quality education and promote global health and wellbeing. Especially for people who live in less developed areas, VR could be a way of connecting them to the outside world and accessing the education and health care resources that they normally not be able to access. Although VR has been studied for several decades, it becomes popular again in recent years and it is still emerging and developing. It has the potential to provide more opportunities and helps in achieving sustainable development goals in the future.

References

1. http://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/15913/
2. Jerald, J. (2015). The VR Book: Human-Centered Design for Virtual Reality. Association for Computing Machinery and Morgan & Claypool.
3. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg4
4. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg3
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6. Ferrer-Garcia, M., Gutierrez-Maldonado, J., Treasure, J., & Vilalta-Abella, F. (2015). Craving for Food in Virtual Reality Scenarios in Non-Clinical Sample: Analysis of its Relationship with Body Mass Index and Eating Disorder Symptoms. European Eating Disorders Review, 23(5), 371-378. doi:10.1002/erv.2375