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It’s almost three years since I started hosting the #CPDinVR events inside Engage. I initially chose Engage for my events inside VR because no other multi-user VR app at the time was fully dedicated to the education space. Also, even though the app was still in its alpha form back then, I loved the look of the app and how professional the settings and avatars looked, the fact that you could import and manipulate so many 3D assets
Here’s a few pics from the very first #CPDinVR event from June 2017:
Over the last few years, I’ve found people often assume that I work for Engage creators Immersive VR Education. Whilst I know David, Sandra, Mike, Chris and many of the other great members of the IVRE team (and have even visited their offices in Ireland), I’ve never worked for the company directly. I just love Engage and moreover, I love introducing people to the platform.
I’ve had the pleasure of welcoming an unbelievable stream of guests onto my #CPDinVR events from innovative educators to academic thought leaders to world-class developers and more. I love vicariously experiencing Engage for the first time again with people and seeing the sparks fly as they start to think of new possibilities for education and training using this mind-blowing platform. I’ve watched inspirational educators like Daniel Bryant go on to host the amazing Educators in VR events after attending #CPDinVR. (Find out more about those here) and after keynoting my #CPDinVR first anniversary event in 2018, Alvin Wang Graylin (China President of HTC Vive) chose Engage to host the recent Vive Ecosystem Conference ( and was joined by other former #CPDinVR alumni including Tom Furness and Charlie Fink.)
Last year, one guest I welcomed to the show was the wonderful Steve Grubbs - CEO of Victory XR. Steve joined an episode of my Live from Dubai talk show to chat about some of the great projects Victory had worked on and some new things in their pipeline.
Victory burst onto the VR education scene with the award-winning frog dissection experience featuring acclaimed science teacher Wendy Martin in holographic form. It's an app I've mentioned many times here on the site and definitely one of the very best educational VR apps I've seen to date.
Victory have since launched a wide range of other science-themed VR experiences covering a wealth of content. This includes other dissection experiences and a host of other science content.
They’ve even begun to produce some awesome AR content too – my favourite being Victor the Torso…
Steve loved being on my show and was struck by the quality of Engage. Little did I know that this ended up sowing a seed for something quite special – a partnership between Victory XR and Immersive VR Education. This is pretty unprecedented and really incredible news for the VR education space. Two of the most talented and dedicated educational immersive technology companies working together is going to lead to some amazing learning experiences for students.
I got a taste of what’s to come last week when I was invited to attend a demonstration lesson inside Engage and coordinated by the Victory team. Wendy Martin (she of holographic frog dissection fame) led an awesome live science lesson with a group of students. The lesson showed off a host of activities that really made the most of Engage’s features including the use of spatial audio to allow for group work, 360° video integration for virtual field trips and shared IFX for interacting with learning artefects.
Here’s a short look at the experience:
This session was essentially hosted as a proof-of-concept to promote the new VictoryXR Academy but to me it was so much more. In 2018 the late, great Chris Long coordinated the “#ClassroomVR” experiment alongside the Immersive VR Education team and the UK Vive team and I was on-hand to deliver a remote lesson to students from Chris’ college alongside Pixar co-founder Loren Carpenter. It took a huge amount of work from everyone involved to coordinate and the hardware had to be brought on site to the college especially for the event. You can read Chris’ full write-up of it all right here.
In my opinion this was the proof-of-concept moment. What I saw Steve, Wendy and the Victory team deliver last week was a much more fully-formed experience. It was kinaesthetic, interactive and multi-faceted and most importantly it was absolutely immersive and engaging for the students involved. I was genuinely blown away and stood watching this stellar learning experience play out thinking, “this is what we’ve been waiting for” - real, live, purposeful learning inside virtual spaces.
I love that this synergy between two of my favourite VR companies has happened and I’m proud to have played a small role in it happening. I honestly can’t wait to see what the future holds for this new partnership between Immersive and Victory. If this opening salvo is anything to go by, it really could herald in a new era for educational VR and I hope that other companies working in this field follow their lead and look for opportunities to collaborate with their peers. If we start bringing the industry together rather than working in silos, we may start to see VR adoption levels in schools really skyrocket.
Find out more about VictoryXR here
Find our more about Immersive VR Education here