Phyo Hein Kyaw -
Gasps echo across the hall as the Myanmar school kids trial virtual reality goggles, marvelling at a device that allows some of Asia’s poorest people to walk on the moon or dive beneath the waves.
“In Myanmar we can’t afford much to bring students to the real world experience,” beamed Hla Hla Win, a teacher and tech entrepreneur taking virtual reality into the classroom.
Few countries in the world have experienced such rapid discovery of technology than Myanmar.
During the decades of junta rule, which ended in 2011, it was one of the world’s most isolated nations, a place where a mobile phone sim card could cost up to $3,000. But today phone towers are springing up around the country and almost 80 per cent of the population have access to the Internet through smartphones.
Tech startups are emerging around the commercial capital Yangon, many seeking to improve the lives of rural people, most of whom still live without paved roads or electricity.
“The increase in activity from last year till now — new startups and working in the tech sector in general — is significant,” said Jes Kaliebe Peterson, CEO of community hub Phandeeyar.
Virtual reality is the latest advance to cause a stir.
The Phandeeyar incubator works with more than 140 startups. Among them Hla Hla Win’s virtual reality social enterprise 360ed, which is using affordable cardboard VR goggles attached to smartphones to break down barriers in Myanmar’s classrooms.
“I see it as an empathy machine where we can teleport ourselves to another place right away,” she said.
And it’s not just school children who benefit from stepping into places they could only ever dream of visiting.
360ed has used virtual reality to help Myanmar teachers attend training courses in Japan and Finland and is working on setting up deals with schools in India, Pakistan, China and Bangladesh.
While 360ed is thinking about the future, Nyi Lin Seck is obsessed with the past. Some 600 km north of Yangon, the founder of 3xvivr Virtual Reality Production launches a large drone into the skies above Bagan, Myanmar’s most famous tourist site.
The drone circles one of the many ninth-to-thirteenth century temples dotting the landscape of what was once a sprawling ancient city.
“A lot of artworks on the pagodas collapsed and were lost. Using this technology, we can record up to 99 per cent of the ancient art,” he says.
— AFP
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