An Interactive Virtual Reality Application in Education for Soil and Water Conservation

Abstract

The paper proposes an interactive virtual reality (VR) application in education for soil and water conservation. Here an android app was developed using VR technology, which can be used for reading a picture book for learning concepts in soil and water conservation. A story is presented by the picture book. Learners play the app with VR in a smart phone and then inserting the smart phone into cheap VR helmets. Learners can watch the VR application by wearing the VR helmet so as to achieve immersive reading in a 3D VR environment. Hereafter, watching the VR application is called watching the 3D VR picture book or 3D VR video. Moreover, learners first wear the VR helmet to read the 3D VR video and then they can use the interaction sign, a double-circle shape, to trigger interactive actions such as playing sound for speaking story, going to next page, going to previous page, showing text annotations, displaying questions for getting responses to the questions, etc. Experimental results show the way learners read the 3D VR picture book has better learning effect, interaction. Furthermore, the interactive portfolios are also collected in the cloud space immediately while triggering actions by the app using the interaction sign. Each record is constructed by experience API. Therefore, interactive portfolios can be analyzed in the future for realizing the behaviors while reading 3D VR picture book.