EON Reality in Irvine is taking high-tech learning to university classrooms ranging from Los Angeles to Michigan, Singapore and the Palestinians’ An-Najah National University in the West Bank.
The software company specializes in what is known as “extended reality” which lets people use electronic devices to visualize objects ranging from the parts of the human heart to component pieces of jet engines with full three-dimensional effect.
Its latest innovation, the MergedXR feature introduced on June 24, lets people be superimposed into a scene to help illustrate various points, in a process carrying the space-age name of “teleporting.”
“We have more than 400 academic institutions around the world,” EON Reality founder and Chairman Dan Lejerskar told the Business Journal.
EON Reality recently announced a new partnership with Nablus-based An-Najah to bring campuswide EON-XR to the institution’s teaching and learning methods. The program there is “progressing very well in spite of the difficulties that they recently experienced,” Lejerksar said on June 25 referring to world events.
Other education partners and users include Los Angeles City College, Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, Mohawk College in Canada, New Mexico State University, Central University of Technology in South Africa and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
“We usually charge per user/per month—$36 per user per month for students and $55 per user per month for teachers and administrators,” Lejerskar says of fees for educational institutions.
Enhanced Images
Extended reality includes wearing the now-familiar headsets or goggles to become totally immersed in all sorts of settings in a computer-generated environment.
Another branch of XR, known as augmented reality, uses superimposed information to help bring a real-world scene to life, sometimes weaving in sound, text and other effects.
The enhanced images show up on a mobile phone, laptop, PC or special headsets, giving users the feeling they are in the scene and able to touch the objects—machines, body parts, almost anything the deserves studying or working on.
Going further, extended reality (XR) is basically the combination of virtual reality and augmented reality.
People generally have a basic understanding of what virtual reality is, so it’s typically easiest to explain that XR is effectively the ability to bring those fully immersive environments into the “real” world via augmented reality, which a lot of people were introduced to through video game Pokémon GO, according to EON Reality.
EON has pivoted in the past two or three years more toward education, while retaining a full roster of business clients, according to Lejerskar. He says the company has been consistently profitable.
Lejerskar says his goal is to “democratize extended reality, not to make it special.”
One recent arrangement is with Owosso, Mich.-based Baker College, where EON Reality is supplying equipment and software for a value of $25 million over five years.
Technology-Driven
“The trends in higher education all point to less passive learning models and more individualized, technology-driven experiences,” according to Baker provost Jill Langen.
Students will be able to virtually take apart, examine and rebuild almost anything, from a computer motherboard to a car engine to a human heart.
“They have the ability to manipulate 3D objects using nothing more than a cellphone or their laptop,” Langen told the Business Journal on May 13.
For example, nursing students learning about blood flow of the heart can actually use their computer or their phone to manipulate the 3D heart to turn it, move it, enlarge it and shrink it, and also take it apart, she said.
Outside the educational area, EON Reality works with organizations as diverse as the U.S. Air Force, global energy giant EDF and the Children’s Hospital of Orange County.
Irvine and Singapore are EON Reality’s biggest offices.
