The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted education at all levels worldwide. This personal account documents some of the details of the shift to remote teaching in a South African context and discusses some opportunities and challenges present in this shift. The focus is on those issues that specifically apply to developing countries and some of these challenges created from a teaching perspective. Unexpected opportunities from the change in teaching methods are also discussed, which may provide insight for further directions of study.

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Virtual reality has the potential to enhance a variety of real-world training and entertainment applications by creating the illusion that a user of virtual reality is physically present inside the digitally created environment. However, the use of tactile feedback to convey information about this environment is often lacking in VR applications. New methods for inducing a degree of tactile feedback in users are described, which induced the illusion of a tactile experience, referred to as pseudo-tactile feedback. These methods utilised shared properties between audio and tactile feedback that can be crossmodally mapped between the two modalities in the design of a virtual reality prototype for a qualitative usability study in order to test the effectiveness and underlying causes of such feedback in the total absence of any real-world tactile feedback. Results show that participants required believable audio stimuli that they could conceive as real-world textures as well a sense of hand-ownership to suspend disbelief and construct an internally consistent mental model of the virtual environment. This allowed them to conceive believable tactile sensations that result from interaction with virtual objects inside this environment.

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