The Interactive Digital Centre (IDC), in Hatfield, will produce virtual reality and augmented reality simulations for use in basic education and vocational training, as well as for use by local companies and public organisations.

The City of Tshwane partnered with US virtual and augmented reality firm EON Reality to establish the centre. Fifty tertiary students a year will also be taught at the centre to develop interactive three-dimensional (3D) content in the form of virtual reality simulations, says Tshwane IDC director Dave Lockwood.

City of Tshwane group CIO Dumisani Otumile highlights that the centre will also support the city’s Tshepo 10 000 job creation programme, which aims to create 10 000 job opportunities for unemployed youths, by providing an effective and visual learning platform for various disciplines.

“Information and communication technology (ICT) interventions are necessary for the transformation of service delivery in the city. This centre is a continuation of the city’s ICT initiatives, such as the Tshwane free WiFi network, which provides each resident with 500 MB a day per device mainly to improve education and access to civil services from the municipality,” he explains.

Visual media are effective at transferring knowledge and can be applied to priority areas such as basic education. Visual media, such as virtual reality, increase the attention levels of students and pupils, which mean that they learn more effectively, recall the information better and retain the information for longer. Studies have shown that virtual reality helps to improve test scores by up to 30%, explains Lockwood.

The firm, which has multiple IDCs and an extensive network of academic and training partner institutions worldwide, brings extensive existing libraries of virtual reality and augmented reality content to South Africa and these will be made available through the IDC and hopes to partner with the Department of Basic Education to use its online content portals in future.

However, much of the content can also effectively be localised, and localisation of content is important to ensure that the content is fit for purpose and suited to the local audience for which it is intended.

“Pedagogical design of 3D learning content is often not to best practice standards around the world. This is why we use local tertiary students, with degrees and diplomas in a variety of technical and creative disciplines, and international developers from our other IDCs at the centre to develop world-class content that matches local educational and vocational training needs,” he explains.

The 3D and virtual reality content can be accessed using Android, Windows and Apple smartphones and tablets, and will also be interactive. Students will be able to use the touch functionality of the devices to interact with the models.

A student’s selection of a particular part can then be entered as an answer during a test, or the system will prompt the student using clues or glow-mesh highlights of the correct part in the case of lessons or revision, explains EON Reality Virtual Reality technical director Erik Kruger.

While the IDC will develop 3D and virtual reality models primarily for primary, secondary and tertiary education, the centre will also support vocational skills development, for example, through the Tshepo 10 000 skills development and job creation programme, concludes Lockwood.