Towards a Social Virtual Reality Learning Environment in High Fidelity
This work addresses the problem of low learning effectiveness for students in remote education by offering an incremental improvement through enhanced immersion in virtual reality.
The paper tackled the limited immersion of traditional virtual learning environments by developing a social virtual reality learning environment over a high-speed network, resulting in better stimulation of lesson generalization to the real world and improved immersion compared to a desktop version.
Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) are spaces designed to educate students remotely via online platforms. Although traditional VLEs such as iSocial have shown promise in educating students, they offer limited immersion that diminishes learning effectiveness. This paper outlines a virtual reality learning environment (VRLE) over a high-speed network, which promotes educational effectiveness and efficiency via our creation of flexible content and infrastructure which meet established VLE standards with improved immersion. This paper further describes our implementation of multiple learning modules developed in High Fidelity, a "social VR" platform. Our experiment results show that the VR mode of content delivery better stimulates the generalization of lessons to the real world than non-VR lessons and provides improved immersion when compared to an equivalent desktop version.