Are Publishers Ready to go Virtual?

Will we see a gold rush in the publishing industry as major players move to invest in Immersive Technologies?

Mark Christian’s job title is rather unique for his industry –Global Director of Immersive Learning — but when I met him at Pearson’s central London office he seemed somewhat bewildered by that: “I’ve actually challenged my competitors to show me where my peer is in their companies, but I don’t see them yet,” he tells me.

Immersive technologies are set to play a key role in modernizing our education, allowing legacy systems to finally move away from models that date back to the 1800s into something more suited for the digital age.

Given the considerable hype that has been building up around Virtual and Augmented Reality, you might expect more publishers to have dedicated resources to these technologies, whereas the reality is that much of what we’ve seen so far has been limited to variations of Augmented Reality books. While that type of content does fall under Christian’s remit, however, he is rather cautious about their long-term future.

“As this technology becomes more ubiquitous, a little pop-up thing in a text book is going to be very uninteresting to a student in five years time,” he says. “They might increase engagement…