Why VILLA VR?
VILLA VR transforms the conventional language learning experience by immersing the learner into a VR world where they can learn new phrases/vocabulary and giving them a tool to use for practicing speaking in their desired language in a judgment free zone. As they spend more and more time on our game, our hope is that our users will improving on their language speaking, comprehension, reading, and learn more vocabulary in a fun and interactive way. We believe that this combination of educational, VR, and RPG would create a novel solution to language immersion and encourage more gamified educational content in VR for the future.
Social Impact
Our team aims to socially impact the world with our project proposal by targeting the fourth goal in the United Nations’ 17 sustainable development goals, quality education. Although VR devices are relatively expensive for individuals, we see a future where schools all over the world can afford VR headsets to give access to students for educational purposes, hence we chose to target creating educational applications for VR headsets.
Within the scope of improving quality education on VR, our team has specifically targeted the topic of acquiring a second language. We believe that giving students around the world access to education to a different language will vastly increase the amount of media and published works they can read, hence increasing their opportunities to educate themselves without the limitations of language barriers. Several members of our team are bilingual, and we have experienced multiple instances where some specific knowledge is only presented in articles or published papers in a singular language, or even acquirable by having conversations with people with other cultural backgrounds. From experience, we envision that pushing down this barrier would give a lot of students around the world the ability to expose themselves to more information in all forms of media and human interaction. As a result, we decided to attempt to make language learning accessible in VR.
Financial Sustainability
If we are successful in marketing this to schools, teachers, as well as individuals and provide an exciting educational experience, future language immersion games with more expansive vocabulary or in other languages can be made for our audience, ensuring the studio’s future. We also see potential in this being a novel tool in transforming how language can be taught both in and outside of the classroom.