VR Education celebrates full launch of 'ENGAGE' platform

Education-focussed virtual reality (VR) technology company VR Education announced the full commercial release of ‘ENGAGE’, its online virtual learning and corporate training platform, on Thursday.

The AIM-traded firm had raised £6m gross to, among other activities, fund the further development of its proprietary ENGAGE platform at the time of its initial public offering in March.

ENGAGE version 1.0 was now available on all industry-leading VR devices, including HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Windows Mixed Reality devices.

Development of ENGAGE mobile was also now complete, and would be made available early next year on devices such as the Oculus Go, Vive Focus and selected Google DayDream devices, the board said.

The content that the group had already created following its partnerships with the BBC, the University of Bristol, the University of Oxford and the University of New Haven would immediately be available on the platform.

Other immersive content would also be available to view within the platform via ENGAGE's 360 video playback streaming system on launch.

“The full release of ENGAGE is a transformational moment in our corporate history and is the result of many years of hard work, cutting edge research and innovation,” said VR Education chief executive officer David Whelan.

“Although significant revenues are not expected to be generated from the ENGAGE platform until general adoption of VR and AR increases over the next two to three years, I am nonetheless delighted that both Nokia and Shenandoah University have signed commercial agreements.

“Being aligned to global leaders like these institutions demonstrates the potential and need for the platform.”

Whelan noted that people globally used the term ‘Skype’ as a verb when discussing online video chat and meetings.

In the future, he said he wanted people to use ‘Engage’ as a similar verb when discussing VR VR-based communications.

“We are also continuing to work with leading professors from Oxford University to provide content on the ENGAGE platform and Intel are currently promoting ENGAGE throughout the US as part of their Tech Learning Lab initiative which will be touring Europe and the UK in the coming months.

“We will immediately start to ramp up the marketing of ENGAGE, including participating at the Bett Show in January 2019 in London and GESS Dubai in February 2019.

“I look forward to updating shareholders on progress in due course.”