This past week the Innovate Mississippi staff and members of the Jackson cohort of the Mississippi Coding Academies took a break to try on VR headsets and spend time in virtual worlds created by students in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
Visiting the offices were Vince Jordan, CEO and president of a virtual reality production company Lobaki, located in Clarksdale, Miss and JR Love with The University of Mississippi’s McLean Institute.
Jordan is promoting the Virtual Reality Center and Academy in downtown Clarksdale—a project he started as part of the Indigo Impact Initiative. The point of the VR Academy is to teach high school students how to create and work in the world of virtual reality—a technology that is in its early stages, the same way that Web technology was in the 1990s or mobile phones in the 2000s.
Jordan, though Lobaki, believes that VR education can encourage kids into STEM careers and provide an economic boost to the Mississippi Delta and other regions of the Magnolia State.
The VR Academy is a 12-week course of personalized instruction (based on the Indigo Impact assessment) that leads toward a final virtual reality project that the students work to complete and then, based on a collaborative discussion, the team decides whether to release the project commercially; if the project shows promise, a marketing plan will be developed and, in some cases, a new company formed.
Pingback: Lobaki: 'Extended Reality' Takes Hold in Jackson, Mississippi • Innovate Mississippi