Designing Immersive Virtual Reality Simulation for Environmental Science Education

Abstract

Recently, severe environmental changes, such as global warming, climate change and environmental pollution, have become expected, and thus environmental education is becoming essential. The purpose of environmental education is to instill awareness in students to recognize and solve environmental problems. Virtual reality provides students with a spatial and temporal experience similar to reality, and it can increase their understanding of knowledge through immersion and interaction compared to traditional learning. In previous studies, virtual reality for education has mainly focused on experience, but it is difficult to find examples for environmental education. Hence, this research proposed an immersive virtual reality simulation for environmental education based on the virtual ecosystem model. It also presented two applications developed based on this simulation. This research aims at encouraging students’ active participation and motivation to solve the environmental problems while experiencing the results of interaction related to environmental factors in a virtual environment.