Bringing people face-to-face with a farmer. Showing consumers the view from a tractor. Letting folks walk around a barn. You might think you can only host these activities if you organize an on-farm event. But guess what? These are all things that virtual reality experiences designed for ag education can do too.

How Virtual Reality Helps Agriculture Education

Virtual reality agriculture-themed experiences are an exciting new option for ag educators. Within the last 5-10 years, checkoffs, Ag in the Classroom chapters, and farm bureaus have all started including virtual reality in their agriculture education programs.

The beauty of VR is that it expands your options. Farm tours are one of the best ways to give consumers a connection to farming, but they aren’t always logistically possible.

With a virtual reality experience, you don’t have to convince people to travel out to a farm. You can instantly immerse consumers in the best possible substitute, wherever your event happens to be.

Corn and soybean checkoffs can use virtual reality to bring people right into the tractor cab to watch cultivation or harvesting. Pork farmers can show people around their livestock barns, even when hosting in-person tours would jeopardize their farm’s biosecurity. Beef or dairy farmers can plop down a camera in their pastures and let consumers feel like they’re standing in the middle of the cow herd. The possibilities for virtual reality in agriculture education are as varied as the ag industry itself.

Making Virtual Reality Farm Tours Easier

We recently completed a project that made one farm bureau’s VR tour even easier to use.

Our clients at South Carolina Farm Bureau already had a 360º video ready to go. It explores the journey of chicken raising, starting from when eggs arrive at the hatchery from the breeder farm. So our job was to design a display that would draw people’s attention to the VR tour.

We created a tabletop unit with a hook for the VR headset itself. Simple graphics on the display show how to wear the goggles. Meanwhile, the acrylic sign features fancy etched lettering that stands out against the glossy, almost glowing background. It looks sharp and high-tech, as a virtual reality display should.

(See photos of somebody interacting with the VR headset displays in our online catalog.)

Taking Virtual Reality on the Road

Now, we’ve built display stations for virtual reality experiences before. Two farm bureaus that we built exhibit trailers for wanted VR stations in their trailers. And those VR experiences turned out great, but the only trouble is, they’re big. Each of them takes up a good chunk of a trailer. Not every group promoting ag literacy has that kind of space. But any agriculture education program could benefit from a virtual reality experience.

That’s why these tabletop units are so powerful. They allow you to host an ag-themed VR experience wherever you are. Do you have space for a table? Then you have space for these display units.