VR as an Educational Tool in Personal Finance
This is my second piece focusing on possible new VR applications, done as part of my Udacity VR Developer Nanodegree.
Today, I’m going to focus on VR as a tool to help illustrate the concepts of personal finance. The target audience for this would be everyone from young adults to those in mid-career and the aim would be to influence them to take charge of their financial futures and create healthy money habits.
This would be a visually-oriented tool to illustrate the great benefits of saving in various types of investment vehicles, the impact of fees on investments, and the power of compounding to secure your future (or reach other goals like funding college).
Here are the key questions…
- How accessible would each VR platform be to your target student in terms of price? Take into account location, age, and income.
Cardboard or another mobile platform would be a great for this tool, as personal finance matters to everyone and so education about it should be as broadly accessible as possible.
- How interactive does your lesson need to be? For example, do I need to pick things up or could I get away with just looking at objects?
Interaction is less important in this tool, but can always enhance the user’s engagement with the material. Much of the benefit I see in using VR for finance education is that it can help people get a sense for the scale (for things like compound interest and the mountain it creates).
- How realistic do your visuals need to be in order to teach? For example, could I use 2D images and videos in a 3D Environment or do you need high poly 3D models.
Realism isn’t necessary to teach this topic. I imagine this would be more of a cartoony experience so low poly would work.
- Does my student need to feel like a participant in the experience or can they be a passive viewer? Could they be both?
For the most part, participation would be an extra here — a means to hold people’s attention. The lessons are pretty straightforward, so any interaction would probably be to customize the results (like enter how much you plan to save for X).
- Given the answers above, what are potential platforms you could use for your experience?
Cardboard and mobile could be the target. High fidelity is unlikely to yield a huge difference and the low availability of things like the Oculus and Vive headsets make it less attractive.
