A Practical Guide, With Theoretical Underpinnings, for Creating Effective Virtual Reality Learning Environments

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen A. O’Connor ◽  
Jelia Domingo
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Learning Environments ◽  
Virtual Communities ◽  
Community Building ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Learning Opportunities ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
Cost Reductions ◽  
Productive Research

With the advent of open source virtual environments, the associated cost reductions, and the more flexible options, avatar-based virtual reality environments are within reach of educators. By using and repurposing readily available virtual environments, instructors can bring engaging, community-building, and immersive learning opportunities to students. Based on many years of academic research and development within this environment, the authors suggest educationally productive, research-supported ways to create learning environments that can motivate, engage, and educate participants. Instructors can develop virtual communities as centers for meetings, collaborations, and shared experiences, moving distance experiences beyond the limitations of engagement and collaboration in nonimmersive settings. The authors explain how instructors can develop useful learning interactions, pilot their learning environments, assess learners, and evaluate the environment. Specific experiences, images, and videos from the authors’ work are shared as well as broader application that could suit multiple purposes in guiding an instructor’s development and instructional efforts.

Design Process for Accessible Virtual Reality Learning Environments

2020 ◽  
pp. 170-183
Author(s):  
Zeoli Antonio Maldonado
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Learning Environments ◽  
Design Process ◽  
People With Disabilities ◽  
Virtual Learning ◽  
Virtual Learning Environments ◽  
Education Industry

Virtual reality has captured the attention of people. Since virtual reality has become more realistic, with the evolution of the technology like the innovation of smartphones, it has been more accessible for society, and many industries have begun research on the application of VR for training and for learning about certain specific topics as it allows reducing accidents and maximizes safety. Their use in the education industry has been best seen as a tool to complement certain issues that may be difficult to understand since it can allow one to virtually move to certain areas from safe areas. However, the development virtual environments is not fully specialized to implicitly include and promote learning, much less the consideration of people with disabilities. The main objective of this chapter is the presentation of a design process for the development of virtual learning environments that allows accessibility.

Networked Virtual Environments

2011 ◽  
pp. 1108-1114
Author(s):  
Christos J Bouras ◽  
Eri Giannaka ◽  
Thrasyvoulos Tsiatsos
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Department Of Defense ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Research Interest ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Networked Virtual Environments ◽  
Academic Networks ◽  
Active Research ◽  
Areas Of Interest

The inherent need of humans to communicate acted as the moving force for the formation, expansion and wide adoption of the Internet. The need for communication and collaboration from distance resulted in the evolution of the primitive services originally offered (i.e., e-mail) to advanced applications, which offer a high sense of realism to the user, forming a reality, the so-called virtual reality. Even though virtual environments were first introduced as stand alone applications, which could run on a single computer, the promising functionalities of this new form of representation and interaction as well as the familiarity of the users with it drew increased research interest. This fact resulted in virtual reality to be viewed as the solution for achieving communication and collaboration between scattered users, in various areas of interest, such as entertainment, learning, training, etc. This led to the creation of Networked Virtual Environments (NVEs). In particular, NVEs were first introduced in the 1980’s and the first areas that exploited the newborn technology were military and entertainment applications. In particular, the U.S Department of Defense played an important role to the direction of applications, protocols and architectures for this promising technology. In the 1990’s, where academic networks became a reality, NVEs drew increased academic research interest and a variety of applications and platforms were developed. In particular, the academic community has reinvented, extended, and documented what the Department of Defense has done. The evolution and the results extracted by research on this field were widely adopted from multiple areas of interest, with main representative the entertainment area. Since 2000, where virtual reality technology, processing power of computers and the network were significantly improved, a wide variety of systems, protocols and applications were developed. In particular, the familiarization the end users with the Internet and the promising advantages and opportunities of Virtual Reality contributed to currently view NVEs as an effective tool for supporting communication and collaboration of scattered users. Currently, the application areas of NVEs have been widely expanded and their use can be found at military and industrial team training, collaborative design and engineering, multiplayer games (Zyda, 2005), mobile entertainment, virtual shopping malls, online tradeshows and conferences, remote customer support, distance learning and training, science, arts, industry, etc. Summarizing, NVEs nowadays tend to consist a powerful tool for communication and collaboration, with applications ranging from entertainment and teleshopping to engineering and medicine. To this direction, in the recent years important active research on this topic in both academic and industrial research is taking place.

scholarly journals Authenticity, Interactivity, and Collaboration in Virtual Reality Games: Best Practices and Lessons Learned

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annie Wang ◽  
Meredith Thompson ◽  
Cigdem Uz-Bilgin ◽  
Eric Klopfer
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Learning Environments ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
User Studies ◽  
Collaborative Problem Solving ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Collaborative Problem ◽  
Motivate Learning

Virtual reality has become an increasingly important topic in the field of education research, going from a tool of interest to a tool of practice. In this paper, we document and summarize the studies associated with our 4-year design project, Collaborative Learning Environments in Virtual Reality (CLEVR). Our goal is to share the lessons we gleaned from the design and development of the game so that others may learn from our experiences as they are designing, developing, and testing VR for learning. We translate “lessons learned” from our user studies into “best practices” when developing authentic, interactive, and collaborative experiences in VR. We learned that authentic representations can enhance learning in virtual environments but come at a cost of increased time and resources in development. Interactive experiences can motivate learning and enable users to understand spatial relationships in ways that two dimensional representations cannot. Collaboration in VR can be used to alleviate some of the cognitive load inherent in VR environments, and VR can serve as a context for collaborative problem solving with the appropriate distribution of roles and resources. The paper concludes with a summation of best practices intended to inform future VR designers and researchers.

scholarly journals A methodology for the design of pedagogically adaptable learning environments.

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julien Saunier ◽  
Mukesh Barange ◽  
Bernard Blandin ◽  
Ronan Querrec
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Production Process ◽  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Learning Environments ◽  
Preventive Maintenance ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Safety Training ◽  
Digital Resources ◽  
Computer Scientists

In the last decades, the industry has profoundly integrated the use of digital resources in their production process. However, these assets are rarely re-used for the training of the users, operators and technicians that have to interact with these objects. Furthermore, although training and learning environments are classical applications of virtual reality, the design of these environments is generally ad hoc, i.e. dedicated to specific operations on specific objects, hence requiring the intervention of programmers whenever a modification of the pedagogical scenario is required. In this article, we propose a methodology to design adaptable virtual environments, by separating the role of the different protagonists that play a part in the creation of learning environments. In particular, its goal is to allow the teachers to implement different scenarios according to the level of the trainees and to the pedagogical objectives without the intervention of computer scientists. An example of adaptable wind turbine environment is shown, with three different learning situations: simulator, safety training and preventive maintenance training.

Networked Virtual Environments

2011 ◽  
pp. 2789-2793
Author(s):  
Christos Bouras ◽  
Eri Giannaka ◽  
Thrasyvoulos Tsiatsos
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Department Of Defense ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Research Interest ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Networked Virtual Environments ◽  
Academic Networks ◽  
Active Research ◽  
Areas Of Interest

The inherent need of humans to communicate acted as the moving force for the formation, expansion and wide adoption of the Internet. The need for communication and collaboration from distance resulted in the evolution of the primitive services originally offered (i.e., e-mail) to advanced applications, which offer a high sense of realism to the user, forming a reality, the so-called virtual reality. Even though virtual environments were first introduced as stand alone applications, which could run on a single computer, the promising functionalities of this new form of representation and interaction as well as the familiarity of the users with it drew increased research interest. This fact resulted in virtual reality to be viewed as the solution for achieving communication and collaboration between scattered users, in various areas of interest, such as entertainment, learning, training, etc. This led to the creation of Networked Virtual Environments (NVEs). In particular, NVEs were first introduced in the 1980’s and the first areas that exploited the newborn technology were military and entertainment applications. In particular, the U.S Department of Defense played an important role to the direction of applications, protocols and architectures for this promising technology. In the 1990’s, where academic networks became a reality, NVEs drew increased academic research interest and a variety of applications and platforms were developed. In particular, the academic community has reinvented, extended, and documented what the Department of Defense has done. The evolution and the results extracted by research on this field were widely adopted from multiple areas of interest, with main representative the entertainment area. Since 2000, where virtual reality technology, processing power of computers and the network were significantly improved, a wide variety of systems, protocols and applications were developed. In particular, the familiarization the end users with the Internet and the promising advantages and opportunities of Virtual Reality contributed to currently view NVEs as an effective tool for supporting communication and collaboration of scattered users. Currently, the application areas of NVEs have been widely expanded and their use can be found at military and industrial team training, collaborative design and engineering, multiplayer games (Zyda, 2005), mobile entertainment, virtual shopping malls, online tradeshows and conferences, remote customer support, distance learning and training, science, arts, industry, etc. Summarizing, NVEs nowadays tend to consist a powerful tool for communication and collaboration, with applications ranging from entertainment and teleshopping to engineering and medicine. To this direction, in the recent years important active research on this topic in both academic and industrial research is taking place.

Moments of friction in virtual reality: How feeling histories impact experience

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-77
Author(s):  
Ty Hollett ◽  
Siyuan Luo ◽  
Nate Turcotte ◽  
Crystal Ramsay ◽  
Chris Stubbs ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Learning Environments ◽  
Learning Opportunities ◽  
Embodied Interaction ◽  
Multimodal Analysis ◽  
Sociocultural Perspectives ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Digital Environments ◽  
Treat All ◽  
Over Time

This article examines embodied interaction in a virtual reality learning environment. Studies of embodied interaction in immersive learning environments, like virtual reality, tend to treat all bodies the same without considering the nuanced cultural histories those bodies have with being mobile, especially within—and beyond—technology-mediated environments. In response, this study pivots from perspectives on embodied interaction that underscore the inextricable link between mind and body in favor of sociocultural perspectives to embodiment that emphasize the cultural-historical production of embodied interaction across space and over time. Through multimodal analysis of 10 learners’ experiences in a virtual reality experience called Thought for Food, this article contributes (1) an overt focus on the importance of feeling histories—embodied ways of sensing, feeling, and moving within digital environments—of learners engaging in virtual reality environments in order to promote equitable learning opportunities and (2) argues for future designs that are attuned to frictions—contestations between bodies and interfaces—that potentially collide with learners’ feeling histories.

LIRKIS Global Collaborative Virtual Environments: Current State and Utilization Perspective

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-106
Author(s):  
Marián Hudák ◽  
Štefan Korečko ◽  
Branislav Sobota
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Smart Devices ◽  
Collaborative Virtual Environments ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Smart Client ◽  
Input Devices ◽  
User Input ◽  
History Of ◽  
Shared Virtual Environments

AbstractRecent advances in the field of web technologies, including the increasing support of virtual reality hardware, have allowed for shared virtual environments, reachable by just entering a URL in a browser. One contemporary solution that provides such a shared virtual reality is LIRKIS Global Collaborative Virtual Environments (LIRKIS G-CVE). It is a web-based software system, built on top of the A-Frame and Networked-Aframe frameworks. This paper describes LIRKIS G-CVE and introduces its two original components. The first one is the Smart-Client Interface, which turns smart devices, such as smartphones and tablets, into input devices. The advantage of this component over the standard way of user input is demonstrated by a series of experiments. The second component is the Enhanced Client Access layer, which provides access to positions and orientations of clients that share a virtual environment. The layer also stores a history of connected clients and provides limited control over the clients. The paper also outlines an ongoing experiment aimed at an evaluation of LIRKIS G-CVE in the area of virtual prototype testing.

Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Environments: Demonstrations of Current Technologies and Future Directions

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 2119-2123
Author(s):  
Sarah Beadle ◽  
Randall Spain ◽  
Benjamin Goldberg ◽  
Mahdi Ebnali ◽  
Shannon Bailey ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Augmented Reality ◽  
Human Factors ◽  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Medical Training ◽  
Risk Environment ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
Simulated Environments ◽  
Interactive Session ◽  
Immersive Technologies

Virtual environments and immersive technologies are growing in popularity for human factors purposes. Whether it is training in a low-risk environment or using simulated environments for testing future automated vehicles, virtual environments show promise for the future of our field. The purpose of this session is to have current human factors practitioners and researchers demonstrate their immersive technologies. This is the eighth iteration of the “Me and My VE” interactive session. Presenters in this session will provide a brief introduction of their virtual reality, augmented reality, or virtual environment work before engaging with attendees in an interactive demonstration period. During this period, the presenters will each have a multimedia display of their immersive technology as well as discuss their work and development efforts. The selected demonstrations cover issues of designing immersive interfaces, military and medical training, and using simulation to better understand complex tasks. This includes a mix of government, industry, and academic-based work. Attendees will be virtually immersed in the technologies and research presented allowing for interaction with the work being done in this field.

scholarly journals From virtual to real healing: a critical overview of the therapeutic use of virtual reality to cope with mourning

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvia Francesca Maria Pizzoli ◽  
Dario Monzani ◽  
Laura Vergani ◽  
Virginia Sanchini ◽  
Ketti Mazzocco
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Side Effects ◽  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Therapeutic Use ◽  
Health Care Needs ◽  
Care Needs ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Critical Overview

AbstractIn recent years, virtual reality (VR) has been effectively employed in several settings, ranging from health care needs to leisure and gaming activities. A new application of virtual stimuli appeared in social media: in the documentary ‘I met you’ from the South-Korean Munhwa Broadcasting, a mother made the experience of interacting with the avatar of the seven-year-old daughter, who died four years before. We think that this new application of virtual stimuli should open a debate on its possible implications: it represents contents related to grief, a dramatic and yet natural experience, that can have deep psychological impacts on fragile subjects put in virtual environments. In the present work, possible side-effects, as well as hypothetical therapeutical application of VR for the treatment of mourning, are discussed.

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