[Students from St Kieran’s National School in Broughal, Co. Offaly]

Irishblacknight writes:

MissionV is a virtual reality platform for teaching and training which is currently beta-testing in 11 Irish schools. Recently, MissionV founder James Corbett brought me to visit one of those schools: St Kieran’s NS in Broughal, Co Offaly. The kids there are expert users of MissionV, which uses OpenSimulator, the open source version of Linden Labs Second Life, running on a closed server, with access controlled by their teacher.

Normally they use a desktop client, keyboard and mouse to build and explore their virtual world, but today James has brought something different: the Oculus Rift VR headset.

Virtual Reality is cool – sure! And Oculus has generated a lot of speculation since its acquisition by Facebook last month. But what’s really cool is that these 10 – 12 year olds learned 3D modelling and scripting, raided the web for textures and images, and recreated a historic site after a field-trip to Clonmacnoise.

H/T: Mark Coughlan