Have you ever been to Beijing, New York, Athens or Rome on the same day? Have you ever travelled to outer space or into the deepest oceanic rift? If the answer is no, you probably haven’t experienced Virtual Reality. Despite its wide impact in both entertainment and training fields, Education has still been trying to find ways to embrace VR in classes. Eventually, the question arises: How can VR benefit students and what is its broader impact on Education?


Virtual Reality (VR) is a computer-based technology that provides visual, aural and tactile stimuli of a virtual world generated in real-time.

This is usually achieved by isolating the user from the real world, thus creating the immersion effect, giving the feeling of being present in a virtual world instead of the one they’re actually in. (Sanchez, Lumbers & Silva, 1999)

Immersion

Immersion is the perception of being physically present in a nonphysical or virtual world.

The perception is created by surrounding the user of the VR system with images, sound or other stimuli that provide a very absorbing environment. Spatial immersion occurs when the user feels the simulated world is perceptual and that they actually are “there”. (Freina & Ott, 2015).

Virtual Reality immersion

Input-Output Devices of Virtual Reality

A variety of input and output devices are used to immerse the user, stimulating as many human senses as possible, most efficiently through a headset.

Headset devices use a stereoscopic display to immerse the user into the digital world visually, while handheld devices track the user’s movement. (Ezawa, 2016; Meinhold, 2013).

Virtual Reality and its impact on education

Virtual Reality was firstly created for entertainment purposes and was then implemented by the US Airforce as part of their flight training program. Later, it was adopted by other industrial sectors such as Architecture, Medicine and Engineering.

However, despite its broad impact in both entertainment and training fields, education has still been trying to find ways to embrace VR in classes.

Virtual Reality has the potential to revolutionise education, as it immerses students in their learning more than any other available medium (Gadelha, 2018).

Here are some of the most common advantages that virtual reality offers in education.

Maximum Safety / low cost

VR enables learners to explore and experience an environment in complete safety, and immerse themselves into settings that would otherwise be inaccessible or too complex to recreate in physical form. (Liu et. al, 2017; Jin Rong; 2017). For example, imagine diving into a sea full of sharks in order to study their natural habitat. How possible and dangerous such a scenario would be to experience in the real world?

Making learning fun

VR has the potential to make learning more enjoyable by allowing students to translate their personal experiences, emotions and memories to the virtual environment. (Lee, 2017). A research by Ozkan (2017) showed that the VR tools in classrooms may have significant positive effects on class motivation, improving students’ engagement with the simulated concept or scenario.   

Information Visualization

VR technology can stimulate or create scenes and effects, particularly when realistic visualizations of scientific material are important for gaining a deeper understanding of the subject of interest. This way the users can experience the concepts and learn them first-hand through three-dimensional (3D) visualization (Lee et al., 2017). For example, in medical research, VR can visualize the inner organs and make it accessible for the researchers to “operate” some virtual nervous tissue (Morehead et al., 2014).

Interactivity

Viewing and interacting with objects at true scale seems to be one of the strongest affordances of Virtual reality. This way, it encourages students to be active learners, because it promotes decision-taking when interacting with the virtual objects, permitting autonomous exploration, understanding complex concepts, creating new experiences, producing the “learning by doing” effect. (Davidekova et al., 2017; Martin-Gutierez, 2017). Therefore, the intrinsic properties and cognitive mechanism of VR technologies enable learners to consciously focus on what they are experiencing and to engage in more meaningful learning (Shen, 2017).

Conclusion

Presently, the adoption and implementation of Virtual Reality in the field of education are still in the progress of preliminary attempt and haven’t yet been brought into the conventional classrooms on a large scale. However, its characteristics of immersion and interaction give VR broad potential in the world of learning and training (Liu, 2017)