Virtual Reality Applications In Education Research Articles

Structured Exposure Achieves High Acceptance of Immersive Technology Among Medical Students and Educators.

Virtual reality (VR) is a potent educational tool with untapped potential in medical training. However, its integration into medical schools faces challenges such as cybersickness and hesitancy among medical students and professionals. Notably, there has been no systematic assessment of the acceptance of medical educational VR applications by both students and educators. In our single-center study, we enrolled 133 medical students and 14 medical educators. Following a practical demonstration of the established VR anatomy application, Sharecare YOU VR, participants completed a self-reporting survey based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), exploring user acceptance of information technologies and focusing on perceived usefulness (PU), perceived ease of use (PEU), and attitude toward using (ATU). We also sought insights into potential future applications of VR in medical education. Our findings indicate a high level of acceptance among medical students and educators upon structured exposure to VR with significantly positive responses for all three TAM variables (PU, PEU, and ATU). Intriguingly, hands-on experience influenced acceptance. Students envisioned VR's benefits in anatomy, surgery, emergency medicine, and communication skill training with patients. Both students and educators believed that VR could enhance traditional approaches and complement the existing curriculum, anticipating improved preparedness for medical students through VR training applications. In conclusion, our results demonstrate the receptivity of both students and educators to immersive technologies, including VR, in medical education. Importantly, the data suggest that the adoption of VR in this field would be welcomed rather than resisted, potentially enhancing students' self-efficacy and enriching the medical school curriculum.

Exploring the Potential of Immersive Virtual Reality in Italian Schools: A Practical Workshop with High School Teachers

In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in affordable and accessible extended reality devices. Big tech companies like Apple and Meta have announced advanced devices expected to become more prevalent in everyday life. As younger generations embrace immersive digital realities for socialization, entertainment, and information retrieval, there is a need to explore immersive digital technologies that support experiential learning and reevaluate educational approaches. In Italy, the COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a growing interest in immersive virtual reality (VR) and the metaverse for distance education. However, the integration of VR in Italian schools could be faster, primarily due to cost and teacher knowledge challenges. Our study aims to involve high school teachers in a practical workshop to assess their knowledge, skills, and intention to use VR in their teaching after brief training. The focus is on evaluating the acceptability of VR for educational purposes among Italian high school teachers. The workshop involved up to 16 teachers at once and was repeated eight times to reach 120 teachers. Participants received VR training and explored three educational VR applications. The results show that teachers are interested in learning and integrating VR into their lessons. They believe it can enhance teaching practices by actively engaging students and enabling experiential learning. This work provides an overview of the current state of VR in education, describes the workshop with high school teachers, and presents the obtained results.

ENERGYSIM: techniques for advancing building energy education through immersive virtual reality (VR) simulation

An important practice for reducing the effects of global warming is the design and construction of energy-efficient buildings. In design education, the full comprehension of thermal behavior in buildings based on their geometry and material composition is required. The complexity of energy simulation principles, vis-a-vis the number of elements that impact the energy loads, their linkages, and their relationships to one another all combine to make this a challenging subject to absorb. Virtual Reality (VR) provides an immersive way to learn the concepts of building energy responses; however, the development of VR applications for education is difficult due to the knowledge, skill, and performance resource-related gaps. Unoptimized VR applications can adversely impact learning if user experiences are broken due to performance lags. This research, therefore, explores VR as a teaching tool for building energy education while showcasing the development process toward a visually accurate simulation and performant application. We developed EnergySIM; a multi-user VR building energy simulation prototype of the famous Farnsworth House. Using this prototype, we document rigorously tested development workflows for improved VR game performance, high visual fidelity, and user interaction, the three key factors which positively contribute to user knowledge retention. The study combines menu-driven interaction, virtual exploration, and miniature model manipulation approaches with the aim of testing user understanding and knowledge retention. Highlighted results provide reduced barriers of entry for educators towards developing higher quality educational VR applications. EnergySIM showcases pre-simulated building exterior surface heatmaps response from four seasons (winter, summer, fall, and spring) alongside an all-year-round sun-hour scenario. Four different material pre-simulated scenarios (single glazing, double glazing, concrete, and wood) for interior atmospheric temperature mapping are also explored. Preferred interaction methods are documented by allowing users’ visual appraisal of alternative building materials based on insulation capacity or resistance to heat flow (R-value). The significance of this work lies in its potential to revolutionize how students, designers, and instructors approach building energy education in today’s world. EnergySIM provides a hands-on and visually engaging learning experience towards the enhancement of knowledge retention and understanding. It pushes the boundaries of development for visual fidelity using geometry/mesh modeling input from various software into game engines and optimizing game performance using the HTC Vive Pro Eye and Meta Quest Pro headsets.

Evaluating Learning Outcomes of Virtual Reality Applications in Education: A Proposal for Digital Cultural Heritage

The surge of Mobile Virtual Reality (VR) applications is getting growing attention among researchers and practitioners. The recent literature demonstrates its benefits when used for education purposes, since virtual immersion yields promising results for learning. Leveraging this trend, within the so called “digital didactics”, the need to gauge VR’s effectiveness in the didactic field has become paramount; so far, a method to connect traditional evaluation strategies to novel VR-based learning is still broadly missing. This paper investigates the problem of quantifying the learning outcomes and proposes a new didactic evaluation method for the Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) learning. This research, conducted in a higher education institute, proposes three new Key Performance Indicators, referring to Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy (RBT) : Mnemonic (M) , Transversal (T) , and Disciplinary (D) . A questionnaire was administered by the same teacher who holds the course, to evaluate how well the application communicated information. The participants have been subdivided into two groups with the same knowledge base. The first group (1ACAT) that represents the “VR group” used the app at home to deepen their subject studies; while the second group (1AGR) that represents the “control group” consulted and studied the app only before the test. The results have demonstrated that the “control group” has a greater ability to support purely mnemonic topics (1ACAT 46.9%, 1AGR 53.1%), such as dates and simple definitions. The skills reached by the “VR group” attest to both transveral (1ACAT 52.9%, 1AGR 47.1%) and disciplinary (1ACAT 52.5%, 1AGR 47.5%) knowledge. These results validate the use of VR in teaching, demonstrating both experiential value and student involvement, but even confirming the compensatory function of VR if compared with the irreplaceable role of teachers in guiding learners to learn.

Immersive Horizons: Exploring the Transformative Power of Virtual Reality Across Economic Sectors

The scholarly discourse surrounding the manifold advantages, applications, and limitations of implementing Virtual Reality (VR) in the contemporary milieu has burgeoned over time. VR holds immense potential, attracting fervent interest from governmental and private entities alike. Nevertheless, the existing body of literature pertaining to the expanding utilization of VR in diverse economic sectors remains scant. Therefore, the primary objective of this study is to furnish a comprehensive literature review encompassing VR applications across various economic domains while elucidating concerns surrounding its integration within engineering education. A total of 108 publications were extracted from prominent databases such as Scopus, Elsevier, Science Direct, and Google Scholar, with a subsequent review of 51 relevant works. These scrutinized journals were published between 2015 and 2022 and were predominantly authored in English. The reviewed publications encompassed VR applications in education, robotics, healthcare, transportation, sports, agriculture, governance, security, and media. The study’s findings unveiled significant advancements in VR implementation within engineering education, medical training, cognitive augmentation, aircraft assembly, governance, and diverse other spheres. Notwithstanding these achievements, impediments to VR deployment were identified, stemming from financial exigencies, cultural and conventional norms, with scant evidence of VR’s prevalence in underdeveloped nations, given that all the assessed research originated from developed economies. Additionally, the limitations of this review encompassed a small sample size and a narrowly focused demographic in the examined articles. Nevertheless, despite these constraints, the research highlights substantial progress in VR utilization over the preceding decade.

Immersive Learning: Characteristics of Development of VR Education Technology and the Practice

In recent years, the application of virtual reality (VR) technology has been witnessing explosive growth. In the field of education, VR provides the learning situations of "immersion", "interaction" and "imagination" for modern education. Its application in education brings a series of actions that optimize conventional teaching concept and methodology, as well as a new perspective for future cultivation of teachers' ability. Researchers of educational technology need to rationally understand the potentiality of the application of VR in education, carry out in-depth analysis of the current application of VR in education, and specifically reflect on the existing challenges from the perspective of education. This article gives an overview of the development of VR educational technology, and summarizes the characteristics and practices of this technology.

Virtual Reality Applications in Education

Virtual reality (VR) is a computer-based simulation technology that enables users to interact while experiencing oneself in a virtual environment.Virtual reality (VR) combines three-dimensional (3D) objects combined with hearing and vision to create effects for users as if they were in a virtual environment. It should be noted here that the use of Virtual Reality is very effective in the field of education Given that a user can observe things in cyberspace from all angles, including above, below, to the left, right, back, and ahead, the 3D coordinate system used in virtual reality (VR) is based on the Cartesian coordinate system.

Implementation of virtual reality in construction education: a content-analysis based literature review

In construction education many research initiatives have explored the adoption of innovative and interactive learning experiences for improving the visual, analytical and problem-solving skills of students. Virtual reality (VR), in particular, has been increasingly viewed as a promising way for students to dynamically interact with information, to test concepts in a visual and intuitive manner and, through real-time feedback, to begin to construct their knowledge and spatial skills. However, with the proliferation of consumer market VR devices and headsets, the question of their appropriateness and specific benefits for construction education becomes even more important and educational VR applications still fall short of offering straightforward VR solutions to consistently realize the said benefits. This also reveals a host of conceptual and empirical challenges in how VR for construction education is conceptualized and justified. This study proposes an extensive review of the literature to identify and discuss contextual factors and trends in VR implementation for construction education in relation to three main foundations: (1) educational theoretical foundations, (2) methodological foundations and (3) technological foundations. A content analysis-based approach is adopted to identify and discuss key research themes. Results from the literature review have provided an insight into the current efforts of the implementation of virtual reality into pedagogy. It has provided a timeline of how such implementation has changed throughout the last twenty years. In addition, this study provides a unique perspective of the methodologies deployed in this research topic as well as an overview of the technological configurations adopted for VR use cases in the construction education domain. Based on these achievements, this study aims to pave the way for new research opportunities in the application of VR in construction education.

Intelligent computation offloading for educational virtual reality applications in smart campus using MoCell

AbstractNowadays, as the smart campus concept becomes a reality, virtual reality (VR) applications are being applied to connect students with the virtual teaching world via VR devices (VDs), enhancing learning efficiency. Nevertheless, VR applications are latency‐sensitive while VDs are subjected to shortcomings to handle many VR applications simultaneously. Fortunately, mobile edge computing (MEC) has been recognized as a promising solution that can bring abundant resources to VDs to relieve hardware limits. However, the computing resources of edge nodes in MEC are limited, and thus how to allocate resources effectively is critical. Meanwhile, some sensitive information of students collected by VD needs to be protected. In view of this, we investigate computation offloading for educational VR applications in MEC‐enabled smart campus. The aims of this issue are to optimize the motion‐to‐photon latency, energy consumption, and resource utilization while satisfying the privacy and security constraints. To this end, we propose a new multi‐objective optimization method using MoCell. Eventually, the experimental evaluations are designed to illustrate the effectiveness and superiority our proposed method.

Accessibility of educational virtual reality for children during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article provides an exploratory inquiry into children’s use of educational virtual reality (VR) at home, thereby complementing prior experimental research about the effects of VR on children. In order to assess the potentially innovative role that VR can play in remote instruction, this study collected data from parents and legal guardians reporting on their children’s VR use at home during the first wave of the shelter-in-place measures resulting from the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. From April to July 2020, parents and legal guardians who own VR devices participated in a survey (n = 311), longitudinal follow-up surveys (n = 60), and in-depth interviews (n = 20). The results indicate how VR can function as an innovative tool for socioemotional learning in a situation of remote instruction by (a) enhancing school materials and (b) sparking conversations about current affairs. Additionally, the results highlight two main barriers obstructing children’s learning with VR. First, VR technology is gendered and may hinder the usage of both women and girls. Second, educational content is hard to find and lacks contextualizing complementary materials. With regard to the first barrier, the authors argue that the gender issue should be addressed in order to make VR more accessible to all children. This article addresses the second barrier by providing a database of educational VR applications. Ultimately, educational VR applications should be complemented with contextualizing materials to reach VR’s potential as an innovative learning tool.

ÖĞRENCİLERİN EĞİTSEL SANAL GERÇEKLİK UYGULAMALARINA KARŞI TUTUMLARINI ARAŞTIRMAYA YÖNELİK ÖLÇEK GELİŞTİRİLMESİ (ESG-TÖ)

This study describes the process of developing an attitude scale to determine middle school students' attitudes towards educational virtual reality applications. The process started with writing the testing items of the scale by conducting a literature review, and then continued with a semi-structured interview with six students. Scale development study consists of two steps. The sample in the first step of the study consisted of 850 middle school students who watched videos about educational virtual reality applications and had previous experience of using virtual reality applications. As a result of the analysis, a single factor structure consisting of 18 items emerged and this structure explains 54.96% of the variance. The Cronbach Alpha coefficient is 0.95 after EFA; It was found to be 0.94 after CFA. The sample of the second step of the study consists of 26 6th grade students who have experienced educational virtual reality applications individually. Descriptive statistical methods were used in the analysis of the data obtained from this group and the Cronbach alpha reliability coefficient was calculated to measure the reliability. Scale scores of more than half of these students are above the average. The Cronbach Alpha coefficient is also 0.90. The analysis results show that the compliance statistics of the eighteen-item attitude scale are at a good level; it shows that the scale is a reliable and valid measurement tool that can be used to determine students' attitudes towards educational virtual reality applications.

Factors influencing behavior intentions to use virtual reality in education

Virtual reality (VR) is a new technology that has applications in a variety of sectors, including medical, education, gaming, psychology, and sociology. The application of VR in education is intriguing and warrants further examination, but research on the subject is currently restricted. VR can benefit education by allowing students to participate in memorable and engaging experiences that they would not otherwise be able to have. Traditional approaches are still used to teach students, which is an essential element of the curriculum for those who want to conceive problem-solving. As a result, there is a scarcity of study on VR deployment. In this paper, we investigated the factors affecting the adoption of VR in higher educational institutes. To this end, we extended the technology Acceptance Model (TAM) with four additional factors and formulated a set of hypotheses. The hypotheses are then evaluated using a dataset collected from 503 Jordanian students. The result shows that the factors perceived facilitating condition, perceived effort expectancy, and perceived compatibility significantly affected the intention to use VR systems and tools for educational purposes. We believe that this study will help decision makers to build sustainable learning and educational systems in Jordan universities.

Virtual Reality (VR) in Superior Education Distance Learning: A Systematic Literature Review

Virtual Reality (VR) is one of the most popular contemporary technologies and it is widely used in the videogame industry, nonetheless, this does not restrict its use in other areas of science, such as medicine or education. Due to the large commotion caused by the appearance of Covid-19, long distance virtual education technologies (e-learning) are being used. With this context, virtual reality is the focus of this study, which had the objective of understanding the work done in superior education at a distance, through the use of VR, by doing a systematic literature review (SLR; LSR in Spanish). The results reveal that the use of VR in education can improve the experience, motivation and the comprehension of abstract concepts for the students, offering them an immersive environment in which they can interact and achieve effective learning. It was concluded that the works that were reviewed regarding the topic evidence a strong growth in the application of VR in education, which in their majority, employ experimental comparative methods between groups of students which use VR when compared to others who use the traditional method.

More than experience? - On the unique opportunities of virtual reality to afford a holistic experiential learning cycle

Virtual reality has been proposed as a promising technology for higher education since the combination of immersive and interactive features enables experiential learning. However, previous studies did not distinguish between the different learning modes of the four-stage experiential learning cycle (i.e., concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation). With our study, we contribute a deeper understanding of how the unique opportunities of virtual reality can afford each of the four experiential learning modes. We conducted three design thinking workshops with interdisciplinary teams of students and lecturers. These workshops resulted in three low-fidelity virtual reality prototypes which were evaluated and refined in three student focus groups. Based on these results, we identify design elements for virtual reality applications that afford an holistic experiential learning process in higher education. We discuss the implications of our results for the selection, design, and use of educational virtual reality applications.

Virtual reality applications in education: a developing country perspective

Virtual reality applications in education have emerged as rapidly developing technologies that have the potential to change education. However, the adoption of these applications has been relatively slow comparing to other applications. This study investigated the factors that affect students' intention to adopt virtual reality applications in education. Utilising the innovation of diffusion theory, the study investigated the factors that affect VR applications' adoption. These factors include social influence, image, and self-efficacy. The moderating influence of gender and age was also investigated. Results show that relative advantage, observability, compatibility, and complexity have a significant positive impact on VR apps adoption, complexity has a negative impact, and trialability has no significant impact. The results also supported the moderating impact of gender and age. Implications, recommendations, and suggestions for future work are presented and discussed.

Virtual Reality Applications in Education: A developing country perspective

Virtual Reality Applications in Education: A developing country perspective

Transcending the Philippine Educational Culturethrough Virtual andAugmented Reality with the Integration of the Learning ManagementSystems

Amidst the current pandemic situation right now, the Department of Education and the Commission on Higher Education are facing a lot of challenges that will take place this coming opening of classes, and part of their initiative is to adopt the mode of flexible learning. In the case of other Higher Education and other educational sectors which caters topractical and situation cases either scientific or technical approaches in facing the real-time situation. The Researcher is propos-ing a new alternative flexible learning that will ease up the situations of the current pandemic in all education levels, which is the integration of Virtual Reality, of AR learning content as part of the educational authoring tools, a web-based platform for the development of Augmented content, the distribution of which is accomplished through standardized Learning Management Systems (LMS) using SCORM packages library. Furthermore, a collaborative framework solves the problem of standard integration of Augmented and Virtual Reality applications in education offering a distributed framework which is the Learning Management System platform, (Barbadillo, Barnera, Goñi, & Sánchez, 2014). Upon the implementation of this interactive and immersive technology platforms, higher-order thinking or critical thinking skills will develop further.

Virtual Reality in Education from the Perspective of Teachers

Virtual reality is the system in which users feel that they are in a virtual world with various equipment and the users interact with this world. With this feature, virtual reality is very useful for many fields of activity, as well as education. Virtual reality applications in education enable students to gain experiences that are dangerous or impossible for them to acquire in real life and learn by doing and living. For this reason, virtual reality is an important innovation for future educational environments. The population of this study is composed of teachers in private schools in Iraq in the 2017-2018 academic year. One hundred thirty teachers participated in the online questionnaire, 101 of which were considered valid. The sample consisted of 101 teachers who completed the questionnaire. Based on the findings, the results of the research were stated, and recommendations were developed. As a result of the research, we realized that the vast majority of teachers think that virtual reality is interesting, encourages students to be active, is suitable for students with schematic and visual thinking style, provides students with a general idea about the subject, facilitates the implementation of information, makes it easier to learn, and it provides a quick review of the course they have studied. They also think it requires concentration.

Comparison of the Effect of Interactive versus Passive Virtual Reality Learning Activities in Evoking and Sustaining Conceptual Change

The key question we address is whether interactivity in a virtual environment (VE) impacts conceptual learning. We developed a Virtual Reality (VR) application to simulate a playground, in which children had to engage in tasks that required solving arithmetical fractions problems. Fifty (50) children were tested in an empirical study with different conditions that varied the levels of interactivity and immersion, from a fully interactive to a non-immersive and non-interactive activity with LEGOs. A methodological framework, where quantitative and qualitative analyses complement each other, was developed to analyze children's activity. Our findings from the quantitative analysis showed that participants in the VEs seemed to have a greater overall gain than those that did not perform the activity in VR but did not clarify whether interactivity in the VE was the defining factor in this gain. The qualitative analysis indicated that it was the “passive” VR condition which provided evidence of sustained conceptual change. With countless educational VR applications becoming available nowadays to the public due to VR's recent resurgence in prominence through inexpensive headsets, the study of the effect of VE attributes, such as interactivity, is timely.

A systematic review of immersive virtual reality applications for higher education: Design elements, lessons learned, and research agenda

Researchers have explored the benefits and applications of virtual reality (VR) in different scenarios. VR possesses much potential and its application in education has seen much research interest lately. However, little systematic work currently exists on how researchers have applied immersive VR for higher education purposes that considers the usage of both high-end and budget head-mounted displays (HMDs). Hence, we propose using systematic mapping to identify design elements of existing research dedicated to the application of VR in higher education. The reviewed articles were acquired by extracting key information from documents indexed in four scientific digital libraries, which were filtered systematically using exclusion, inclusion, semi-automatic, and manual methods. Our review emphasizes three key points: the current domain structure in terms of the learning contents, the VR design elements, and the learning theories, as a foundation for successful VR-based learning. The mapping was conducted between application domains and learning contents and between design elements and learning contents. Our analysis has uncovered several gaps in the application of VR in the higher education sphere—for instance, learning theories were not often considered in VR application development to assist and guide toward learning outcomes. Furthermore, the evaluation of educational VR applications has primarily focused on usability of the VR apps instead of learning outcomes and immersive VR has mostly been a part of experimental and development work rather than being applied regularly in actual teaching. Nevertheless, VR seems to be a promising sphere as this study identifies 18 application domains, indicating a better reception of this technology in many disciplines. The identified gaps point toward unexplored regions of VR design for education, which could motivate future work in the field.