I work in a middle school and we are thinking about getting around 35-40 standalone VR headsets mostly to enhance our curriculum. I do have a few questions I was hoping those here may be able to answer:
A few months back, prior to Covid, we were able to try out the Lenovo Mirage Solo, now discontinued, sadly. The great thing about it was that it came with a "teacher's tablet" that allowed the staff to pretty much control what the students were seeing. As we are a school, we need to be able to have some sort of easy to access teacher or administration controls that will enable us to monitor and ensure that the students are staying on task and not playing VR games when they're not supposed to. Does Oculus offer some sort of tablet or device that would allow this?
I am also aware that those using the Oculus VR headsets need to have a facebook account. With that said, if we had 35-40 headsets all going at once, is there a way they can all be "linked" so that only an administrator would need to be logged into facebook? Can multiple headsets even be linked like that so everyone is doing the same thing, together?
What sort of OS does Oculus use? Is it something like Google, where we could download our own educational content and apps?
To be honest, I am not even sure any headset from Oculus would be a good choice for us. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lack of good choices for education available, especially now that the ones from Lenovo are not available anymore. If someone has a better recommendation than any from Oculus, I'd appreciate the feedback.
There's no provided way of controlling the headsets remotely with a tablet, but it could be developed.
For this kind of situation, you really need the business edition of the Quest. The normal edition is for non commercial individual use only. The business edition can be used commercially, plus it doesn't have the facebook account requirement. It does cost way more though.
The Quest runs on Android, but it can't run android apps that aren't designed for it. The SDK is free, you can develop stuff for it. The business edition gives you a lot more control over how things are deployed and what the headset does (like limiting access with a kiosk mode).
Another one to look at is the Pico Neo 2. It's very similar to the Quest, but apparently a lot less restrictive. It's only for enterprise customers though, I don't know if they will sell to a school.
I am a high school teacher who sponsors the science club. I would love to hear about any best practices other educators have implemented to give the students the best experiences possible. Are there any other discussions here or elswhere that I could access in order to educate myself on this whole vr opportunity? Thanks!
Getting districts to open ports to Facebook in 6-12 educational settings is also very prohibitive, so even if "fake" student FB accounts could be created, FB is blocked on most student networks along with other social media. I'm wondering if that would be a factor?
