upGrad, an online higher education firm has partnered with Israel-based EyeWay Vision to pilot enlarged reality-based immersive knowledge experiences on its platform, as it looks to advance interactivity and engagement among its students.

upGrad co-founder Phalgun Kompalli, states, "We have identified two key areas in upGrad for this pilot. The first is our data science and machine learning programmes, which is one of our core strengths. The number of students we have there is much larger than any other programmes and hence will serve as a good base for this test. We have dedicated courses on data visualization, and big data learning, where we believe the subject naturally lends itself to this particular technology."

Phalgun adds, "Online education cannot be just you and your computer constantly interacting, because it becomes boring after a certain point. Hence, it becomes very important to ensure that students interact with other students and the faculty."

The company privileges to have more than one million students across more than 50 countries. Over 50,000 of them are paying users. It recorded an annual proceeds run rate of $165 million for the fiscal year 2021.

Nikhil Balram, the chief executive of EyeWay Vision Inc, a Silicon Valley subsidiary of EyeWay Vision, states, "Partnering with upGrad is the perfect opportunity to apply EyeWay's advanced AR technology to enhance the whole learning experience by making it immersive and distraction-free, gamifying online learning for high course completion rates. EyeWay’s AR uses eye-tracking, direct retinal projection, and foveated projection to produce a tenfold improvement in visual enhancement.”

EyeWay, which amounts to Samsung, Verizon, and ICONIQ Capital among its investors, is also emerging an immersive augmented reality-based head-mounted-display prototype that is projected to be available around Q4 2021. This prototype will be used to empower a learning involvement at a later stage, which will be further established by UpGrad and its content partners.

Phalgun states, "The challenge is to see how we can establish a very strong value proposition and user interface. Once we do that, we will figure out how to scale it. I think for the immediate phase of this partnership, it is more important for us to establish a strong value proposition and then figure out if it involves hardware, how do you package that as part of the entire programme, pricing the value proposition, and deliver it as scale."

Anthony Rowe, Siewiorek, and Walker Family professor of electrical and computer engineering, at Carnegie Mellon University said, "Incorporating AR technology into online learning is a compelling application that creates an engaging and immersive learning experience for students in digital education."