China's Xiamen is now home to a new augmented reality play-based learning center, courtesy of Blue Hat Interactive Entertainment Technology (Blue Hat).
Blue Hat develops and operates augmented reality (AR) interactive entertainment toys in China. Its new learning center will feature both AR games and educational content for children aged between one and seven years old.
The play-based learning center will provide an immersive learning experience across art, emotional, health, language, science, and social subjects.
Accordiing to Blue Hat, the courses on offer develop children's skills in eight different areas: motor skills, cognitive skills, concentration and memorization, creativity and imagination, social and emotional skills, leadership, teamwork, and understanding rules and solving problems.
"We are very excited to open our first AR play-based learning center," comments Blue Hat chief executive Xiaodong Chen.
"We believe our AR technology leads the trend in early childhood education, as the tools and content we develop enrich children's learning processes with immersive, real-life experiences. Our goal is to cultivate a fun environment, guided by our teachers, that enables young learners to explore their interests as well as develop core skills for school."
China and the wider Asia Pacific region are embracing AR and virtual reality (VR) technologies more than ever before, with IDC predicting that businesses in Asia Pacific will spend approximately US$7.5 billion on those technologies by the end of the year.
Although most of this spend will account for rising investments by the public sector and distribution, personal and consumer services follow closely behind.
“Virtual reality games are the leading use case garnering around 19.3% of the overall AR/VR spend in 2019, followed by training, and 360-degree educational video viewing,” IDC states.
According to IDC, the China market will represent the largest AR/VR spending in Asia pacific, with more than 87% market share.
“AR/VR technology can deal with most of the requirements of the future of businesses in this millennials workforce from facilitating better corporate training experiences to improvise collaboration, giving shape to new ideas to product design and development,” comments IDC Asia/Pacific associate market analyst Ritika Srivastava.
“Furthermore, industries like Personal and Consumer Services, Construction, Education, Retail and Healthcare Provider are expected to be potentially disrupted by this technology with the combined spending of $29.5 billion by 2023,” adds Srivastava.
IDC further notes that, “While, AR/VR technology in ASEAN countries of Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) are slowly gaining trend and experimenting on how AR/VR can improve the industry experience.