By: Franyi Sarmiento, Ph.D., Inspenet, June 23, 2022
One of the largest public universities in the United States by number of students may be planning to hold virtual classes in the metaverse in the future.
[post_relacionado]According to records filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), on June 7 and 8, the Arizona Board of Regents, on behalf of Arizona State University, filed seven applications for variations of its name – ASU, Arizona State, Arizona State University – as well as that of its soccer team, the Sun Devils, for use in a virtual world. The trademark applications included the university’s name, as well as the trident symbol and the Sun Devils logo for use in “virtual worlds in which users can interact for recreational, leisure or entertainment purposes,” as well as for educational purposes.
By its second semester of 2021, ASU reported that 77,881 students were attending physical campuses in the U.S. states, while 57,848 were attending via “digital immersion.” It is unclear whether the university’s possible move into the metaverse may have been driven by having more than 42% of its students taking classes online. ASU’s senior director of strategic student and program mobilization, Casey Evans, said digital immersion courses were the “best tool to allow students to continue learning during this time of physical distancing.”
Trademark filings also suggest that ASU may be exploring the use of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, to authenticate many documents, from diplomas to tickets to university events. ASU has previously adopted Blockchain technology for various uses within the university, including tracking the spread of the COVID-19 infection in November 2020 and sharing data from its students’ academic records in 2019.
Other universities have undertaken similar initiatives to “enter the metaverse” in 2022. Cointelegraph reported in May, the University of Sao Paulo plans to investigate the effectiveness of virtual and augmented reality devices, as well as how their use might affect human behavior.
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