The Department of Education in the United Kingdom launched its first augmented reality (AR) Career fair on Tuesday in partnership with Snapchat the website XRToday reported. The ‘Get the Jump’ campaign, as the Career fair has been termed relies on Snapchat’s AR Lens platform and is the first AR-based program ever to be launched in the UK. With the career fair, the government there aims to make young Britons aware of the education and career options they can go for. Those can range from apprenticeships to Higher Technical Qualifications and many more other options.
Those interested to join the career fair can do so with the Snapchat camera app. They will next be required to tap on the ‘Get the Jump’ Skills for Life icon to have access to the fair details as well as the official site for the same. Then there also is the Snapchat’s Discovery tab where videos from London’s Future Studios are being shown. The videos highlight real-life experiences for the various training programs and different careers those can lead to. The Get the Jump career fair campaign will be live till March 31.
Rebecca Thould, Head of Campaigns for Young People and Adult Skills at the Department for Education said, “We know that Snapchat reaches 90 percent of 13-24-year-olds in the UK so partnering with Snap was an obvious choice for the DfE. This campaign has enabled us to create a new and immersive way for young people to understand and engage with the education and training choices they have, in an environment native to them.”
The UK government’s DfE’s efforts to make future generations better aware of career choices they have isn’t an isolated development though. For this marks a growing trend where government bodies, organizations, and companies are taking to Extended Reality or XR to impart training to the future generation of professionals.
Take for instance the Queen Mary University in the UK that created history in being the first in the country to impart lectures on medicine and human anatomy in virtual reality. That was in January and became the first institute in the UK to do so. Cambridge University and Radio Caca followed suit in adopting AR/ VR tech and launched a Metaverse EduTech platform for students.
The IT consulting firm Accenture took things to a new level by adopting full-scale Metaverse enterprise solutions. The Dublin-based firm also placed orders for 60,000 Meta Quest 2 headsets for the purpose.
Washington, DC-based XR Association too had hosted the Limitless Future Conference last November where they discussed the emergence of new AR/ VR technology, their use cases, and how the same can lead to better employee retention rates and create new career opportunities in the process.
With a keen interest in tech, I make it a point to keep myself updated on the latest developments in the world of technology and gadgets. That includes smartphones or tablet devices but stretches to even AI and self-driven automobiles as well, the latter being my latest fad. Besides writing, I like watching videos, reading, listening to music, or experimenting with different recipes. Motion picture is another aspect that interests me a lot and maybe I’ll make a film sometime in the future.