The word "meta universe" is everywhere now. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, changed his name to Facebook in October. For a time, the discussion about the meta universe was rampant. According to the Baidu Index, the overall average daily search times of the keyword "meta universe" in the past six months were 26568, an increase of 6213% month on month. Although the meta universe is very hot, the public's understanding of the concept, application, prospect and risk of the meta universe is still vague and abstract. What is the ideal application scenario and landing status of education meta universe? What problems does the educational meta universe still face? 01 what is the meta universe of education What is the "meta universe" and does it really exist? Zuckerberg once said, "the metauniverse provides people with a more immersive and immersive digital platform and media, which makes people feel like they are on the Internet, not just from the side. The metauniverse can bring people a new online social, work, education, entertainment, shopping and creative experience - a wonderful experience brought by immersion and presence." From an academic perspective, in January this year, the new media research center of Tsinghua University gave a more detailed definition of the meta universe in its Research Report on the development of the meta universe. "Metaverse" It is a new type of Internet application and social form integrating virtual reality and reality produced by integrating a variety of new technologies. It provides immersive experience based on extended reality technology, generates a mirror image of the real world based on digital twin technology, builds an economic system based on blockchain technology, and closely integrates the virtual world with the real world in economic system, social system and identity system, And allow each user to produce content and edit the world. " What is edu metaverse? The combination of meta universe and education can be understood as the application of meta universe in the field of education. It creates digital identities for teachers, students, managers and other stakeholders, opens up formal and informal teaching places in the virtual world, and allows teachers and students to interact in the virtual teaching places. 02 three ideal application scenarios "My dream is to let children enter a holographic projection world at home and learn from AI virtual people." This is the beautiful scene of science fiction writer Hao Jingfang's conception of the meta universe. "The meta universe will be an inner roll of the whole human civilization and will lead mankind to death." This is the science fiction writer Liu Cixin's query on the significance of the existence of the meta universe. These are two completely different attitudes towards the meta universe, the opposition between beautiful fiction and reality. In fact, the meta universe is not equivalent to vr virtual reality, but constructs a digital world and virtual world that are completely different from the physical world and the real world. In the virtual world, people do not participate in the meta universe with a digital account, but participate in the meta universe with an independent digital identity as in the real world, and can make their own rules act on the meta universe. When the meta universe meets education, what sparks will be rubbed between the two? Situational teaching, game teaching and teacher research and training are the three ideal application scenarios of educational meta universe that are favored by the academic and scientific circles at present. "Imagine yourself in..." this is a sentence often used by teachers in Chinese, history and geography classes to guide students to imagine. In the metacosmic world, students will no longer need the oral guidance of teachers. They can immediately enter the prehistoric world to observe dinosaurs closely, do business with Persians in the streets of the prosperous Tang Dynasty, and shuttle freely at the bottom of the Mariana Trench and the top of Mount Everest. The most direct change of educational meta universe to existing education is situational teaching. Under the situational teaching mode, learners can wear VR terminal to enter the teaching situation created or selected by teachers in advance, and carry out multi person online inquiry, collaborative and personalized learning activities with the help of interactive devices such as head mounted display, headset, handle and data gloves. In addition, learners can also enter different disciplines or professional classrooms, connect remote teaching places through holographic video, panoramic live broadcast and other technologies, and carry out real-time visual online teaching and classroom interaction based on field scenes. Zuckerberg made some imagination about the application of educational meta universe in situational teaching scene. "Students can not only observe different stars closely and learn astrophysics, but also be transmitted to a historical node and scene to understand the historical process." In addition, as the embryonic form of the meta universe, the relationship between the two is inseparable. Online games are very similar to many features of the meta universe, such as virtual economic system, strong virtual identity, strong social interaction, free creation, immersive experience and so on. Therefore, game teaching has become another ideal application scene of educational meta universe. The game based learning supported by educational meta universe can be understood as a learning method that integrates knowledge and entertainment with VR, AR, Mr, artificial intelligence, brain computer interface and other technologies, takes learning as the ultimate goal and immersive games as the main means, so as to realize the real sense of teaching in fun. For example, students can choose game characters with different characteristics, game characters with different difficulties, game scenes with different styles and game mainlines of different types, creatively complete game tasks in various ways and ways, and enjoy super permissions such as creating game characters and continuing game mainlines without destroying the game framework and learning purpose. In addition to situational teaching and game teaching, another ideal application scenario of educational meta universe is to create teaching and research situations to assist teachers' research and training. Compared with the first two, the teaching and research situation is closer to the real classroom teaching, and can simulate various real teaching events, such as teaching activity preparation, teacher-student question and answer, student classroom discipline violation, etc. At the same time, the teaching and research situation created by using the educational meta universe is repeatable, which can greatly reduce the time and cost of research scene construction, and promote teaching and research training to become a normal activity. 03 market first, difficult to land Generally speaking, the research on educational meta universe at home and abroad is still in its infancy, with less relevant theoretical research and more market-oriented. Technology companies were the first to smell the opportunity of metauniverse. In March 2021, roblox, the world's recognized "first stock of the meta universe", landed on the New York Stock Exchange, which ignited the enthusiasm of investors. Especially after October 2021, with the renaming of Facebook to meter, well-known technology enterprises at home and abroad such as Microsoft, apple, Tencent, Huawei and byte beat have laid out meta universe related industries. On February 10 this year, invact metauniversity, an educational technology company combined with "Yuan universe", completed the first round of financing, with a valuation of more than 200 million yuan. Invact metaversion integrates the characteristics of traditional education mode and metauniverse, and is committed to applying virtual reality (VR) and game experience to education services. Although there are no large-scale investment and financing cases in domestic education and technology enterprises, many leading companies also speak frequently and occupy the ranking. From the track of the landing of the education meta universe, the current exploration of the education meta universe is mostly concentrated in the field of higher education. NYU has established NYU campus after AR technology processing. NYU's name and logo are suspended in the sky. Each floor of the teaching building has its own name to show its function, and the green icon shows the entrance; In addition, New York University has a new way to play - holding an art exhibition in metauniverse to display 3D image art works; UC Berkeley established a virtual blockeley in minecraft video game, restored every scene of the school, and held an online virtual graduation ceremony; Stanford University opened its first course to the meta universe in 2021. Note: NYU Campus Tsinghua University in China officially launched the "metauniverse special program" in October 2021. With the theme of "art science metauniverse", it uses roblox (a company jointly established by roblox and Tencent for Chinese users) and other technical carriers to express the conceptual design, presenting the future science and Technology Museum, future museum, space exploration, future city Design works in the direction of cultural heritage. Yuancosmos has shown its great application potential in the field of higher education. However, objectively speaking, whether abroad or at home, the applied research and exploration of the meta universe in the field of education is still in its infancy. Most of the relevant research results belong to empirical assumptions and designs, and there is still great uncertainty about the landing of the meta universe. The lack of top-level design and evaluation mechanism is the primary problem of the implementation of educational meta universe. At present, there is no systematic planning for the application of meta universe in the field of education, and there is a lack of clear development objectives and market mechanism. In recent years, although the state has issued policies to support the application of VR and AR education. For example, the 14th five year plan points out that the VR and AR industries should be listed as one of the key industries of digital economy in the next five years, this is only a programmatic policy. At present, there is still a lack of systematic arrangement of the adaptation of the teaching materials of various disciplines and stages to the teaching methods of VR and ar, No unified scheme has been formed. Secondly, there is an urgent need to break through the technical difficulties of supporting the bottom of the educational meta universe. Although the current network technology has made great progress, it is still insufficient, such as 5g network is not popular enough, artificial intelligence is not intelligent enough, virtual reality is not immersive enough, augmented reality is not virtual real integration, human-computer interaction is not natural enough, etc. Moreover, at present, VR and AR teaching application products in campus classroom are mainly popular science experience, many stay in the stage of demonstration and simple interaction, and there is insufficient in-depth research on the teaching content of the course. Finally, there are still great ethical risks in the educational meta universe. From the perspective of privacy, in the meta cosmic world of capital manipulation, how to protect individual privacy data and how to reasonably collect and store student data is a difficult problem; It is also a difficult problem that the educational meta universe has a strong risk of "addiction" due to embodied interaction, immersion experience and "compensation effect" on reality. Some people say that 2022 is the "first year of the meta universe". Others jokingly say that "everything can be a meta universe". Is the meta universe a real change or a pseudo concept? Everyone sticks to their own opinions, just like Hao Jingfang and Liu Cixin's different views at the beginning, but in any case, a new round of global scientific and technological revolution is brewing. (Xinhua News Agency)