In the state of Arizona, virtual reality headsets are part of the learning experience

In most universities, student loans help pay for tuition, lodging and meals and textbooks.

This semester, biology students from Arizona State University will use these same funds to fund a new kind of educational tool: virtual reality headsets.

Long popular with players attracted by immersive imaginary worlds, virtual reality headsets are increasingly used by scientists, doctors and even the military.

According to Michael Angilletta, deputy director of undergraduate programs at the Faculty of Life Sciences of the University of Life Sciences, there is potential for the potential role of virtual reality. State of Arizona.

Angilletta said the desire to provide students with hands-on real-world experience had prompted school officials to partner with Google and Labster, a virtual reality development company, to create environments simulated for online students enrolled in a general biology course. Students will use virtual reality headsets to meet the laboratory's course requirements.

In August, several tens of students tried the Lenovo Mirage Solo helmet at $ 400 for a test. School officials say that ASU's online biology course is the first in the country to offer virtual reality labs.

"The virtual environment allows for highly innovative and creative problem-solving and skill-building games," said Angilletta, noting that in October around 150 headsets will be borrowed by students. "We want them to have the full experience of being in a laboratory or studying Antarctic seals."

One of the students' virtual work involves working in a busy laboratory where they wear a lab coat and gloves before taking blood samples from basketball players to determine their glucose levels.

Another scenario sends students to a distant planet with a team of scientists. The goal: to determine how to build a space station without harming the planet's exotic biodiversity. Angilletta said that for this scenario, a team of ASU biology faculty and Labster designers had tried to create animals and wildlife that looked little like living organisms found on Earth. According to Angilletta, in another scenario of exoplanets, students are forced to diagnose why the harvests of their team are dying, putting the mission at risk.

Angilletta said that when he is himself immersed in the simulations, he has trouble removing his goggles. Ultimately, he thinks, the VR will include gloves giving users a tactile sensory experience.

"The fact that I can mislead means that students will get lost in these problems and feel that they are real problems," he said. "We think they'll be much more engaged than they would just watch a flat computer screen."

A study conducted in 2016 concluded that virtual reality can successfully replace laboratory experiments in the real world. European researchers randomly selected 189 students from an undergraduate biology course and asked them to practice "eliminating bacteria on agar plates in a virtual environment."

The students were then assessed on their ability to perform the same exercise in a real laboratory. The results showed that there was no significant difference between students practicing in a virtual environment and those practicing in a physical lab.

"Our data shows that vLABs work as well as face-to-face tutorials to prepare students for a physical laboratory activity in microbiology," the study concluded.

According to the New York Times, scientists are also turning to virtual reality to create interactive three-dimensional models that they used to create manually. The creation of "nanoscale" models – a size in which objects are invisible to the naked eye – could allow scientists to interact with these objects in a radically new way, according to a new article in the journal Science Advances.