Silicon Valley’s Eon Reality gives US$25 mil to The UWI
Open Campus for global online strategy
The UWI Regional Headquarters, Jamaica. Thursday, March 25, 2021. A grant from Silicon Valley-based company, Eon Reality, to The UWI Open Campus is the largest in decades for the University, and provides a critical foundation that will support the rise of The UWI Global Campus.
Funded by Eon Reality’s Educational Foundation, as a part of its support towards educational institutions in the post-pandemic period, the US$25 million grant specifically enables the setup of an Interactive Digital Centre/Lab primarily for the development of content using Augmented and Virtual Reality Tools.
This alliance makes The UWI the first institution in the English-speaking Caribbean to have an Eon XR Lab. The hub of the Eon XR Lab is earmarked to be located at The UWI Open Campus site in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago. During the five-year project, The UWI Open Campus will be able to offer training to UWI-wide faculty on the Eon XR Cloud Platform as well as student internships to those interested in learning how to develop content using this technology. Eon has already delivered the cloud platform, and training of staff is carded to begin in the next week.
Commenting on the novel partnership that helps bridge the digital and physical worlds, Dr. Luz Longsworth, Pro Vice-Chancellor, Global Affairs and Principal of The UWI Open Campus, noted the remarkable revenue generation opportunity for the Campus and The UWI. She explained, “We see this as a way to open up even further collaboration with Industry in developing new training tools for their staff. Furthermore, Eon Reality’s global academic network educational institutions on several continents, allows us to leap frog into the international access of The UWI’s courses and programmes within their network. This signals a new move forward for developing exciting content for our online and blended programmes.”
This latest collaboration for The UWI in garnering international resources to support its global agenda opens up a whole new world for programmes in areas such as Engineering, Medicine, Science and Technology to develop content that can enhance the students’ learning experience in an online environment, and helps overcome some of the limitations that the institution has faced in taking its programmes online.
Remarking on the value this adds, as the University charts its path into global markets, Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Hilary Beckles congratulated the championing role that Dr. Longsworth has played, not just in securing these game-changing resources, but also in the overall strategising of the UWI Global Online as a natural expansion development for our teaching and learning environment. He said, “This collaboration will provide the impetus for realising The UWI's Global Campus initiative, our future without borders. The Open Campus is demonstrating very practically, how it is driving our access revolution, with agility and alignment of our internal capacities across all our campuses. We celebrate the brilliance of our Open Campus leadership in pioneering this. Here is our frontline campus, evolving to keep apace of the changing times, while simultaneously changing the delivery of Higher Education in the region and at The UWI as a whole.”
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About Eon Reality
EON Reality is the world leader in Augmented and Virtual Reality academic and industry training solutions. Believing that knowledge is a human right and should be available, accessible, and affordable for every human on the planet, it has spent the last 20 years developing the de-facto standard for AR/VR education and industry solutions that support devices from mobile phones to head-mounted displays to large-scale screens and facilities. With more than 20 locations worldwide, EON Reality has created the largest AR/VR training library with over 8,000 applications and 40 million users around the world. As the culmination of years of work with Fortune 1000 companies, global enterprises, and world-class academic facilities, EON Reality’s EON-XR Platform serves as the primary product and content delivery vehicle for the Irvine-based company. Founded around the principles of “Learn, Train, Perform,” EON-XR contains the backend support and architecture that large organizations need to quickly and efficiently build, deploy, and scale AR and VR applications to supplement their current training and productivity efforts. With AR, VR, and mobile functionalities, EON-XR functions across all major devices and operating systems.
About The UWI
The UWI has been and continues to be a pivotal force in every aspect of Caribbean development; residing at the centre of all efforts to improve the well-being of people across the region.
From a university college of London in Jamaica with 33 medical students in 1948, The UWI is today an internationally respected, global university with near 50,000 students and five campuses: Mona in Jamaica, St. Augustine in Trinidad and Tobago, Cave Hill in Barbados, Five Islands in Antigua and Barbuda and its Open Campus, and 10 global centres in partnership with universities in North America, Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe.
The UWI offers over 800 certificate, diploma, undergraduate and postgraduate degree options in Culture, Creative and Performing Arts, Food and Agriculture, Engineering, Humanities and Education, Law, Medical Sciences, Science and Technology, Social Sciences, and Sport. As the Caribbean’s leading university, it possesses the largest pool of Caribbean intellect and expertise committed to confronting the critical issues of our region and wider world.
Ranked among the top universities in the world, by the most reputable ranking agency, Times Higher Education, The UWI is the only Caribbean-based university to make the prestigious lists. In 2020, it earned ‘Triple 1st’ rankings—topping the Caribbean; and in the top in the tables for Latin America and the Caribbean, and global Golden Age universities (between 50 and 80 years old). The UWI is also featured among the top universities on THE’s Impact Rankings for its response to the world’s biggest concerns, outlined in the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including Good Health and Wellbeing; Gender Equality and Climate Action.
For more, visit www.uwi.edu.
(Please note that the proper name of the university is The University of the West Indies, inclusive of the “The”, hence The UWI.)
