Exploring Virtual Reality

Project Team

Andrew Ireland, Jude Kingsley-Arthur, Tzu-Huan Lin, Eleni Pavlaki, Zhidong Zhang

 

Supervisors and course

Prof. Dr. Maria Bannert and Elena Tangocci, RTL WS18/19

 

Project Overview

The target group will be the fresh graduates in Research on Teaching and Learning program at Technical University of Munich. The educational goals are to deliver the knowledge of different educational systems in different countries, the learners will know the difference, the advantages, and the disadvantages by comparison.

Based on Burdea and Coiffet’s study (Burdea and Coiffet, 2003), virtual reality (VR) has been defined as I3 for “immersion-interaction-imagination”, VR will be implemented by 3D graphic systems in combination with various interface devices to provide immersion, therefore the learners will have interaction with the 3D graphic systems and designed to input a learner’s commands into the computer and to offer feedback for the learners. In the virtual environment projected by VR, there are two kinds of immersions, physical and mental immersion (Sherman and Craig, 2003). When the user moves, the visual, auditory, or haptic devices that establish physical immersion in the scene change in response (Sherman and Craig, 2003); on the other hand, mental immersion refers to the “state of being deeply engaged” within a VR environment, for instance, if a VR world is designed for entertainment purpose, the success in mental immersion is based on how involved the user becomes (Sherman and Craig, 2003), namely the degree of the learner’s involvement into the VR.

Virtual reality is not only an immersive user interface, but also serves to present and solve real problems in interdisciplinary subjects. Therefore, we have decided to use VR to design the program to introduce the educational systems.

 

Details

The main idea of the program would be divided into three workshops based on different educational systems. The learners need to put on the VR devices to be involved into the virtual environment. The activities of each environment would be designed base on the characteristic of each educational system. Finland: A virtual lecture will be conducted, a recorded lecture hosted by a Finnish teacher talks about the Finnish educational system and the reason behind the success of Finnish international performance. The learners will be immersed into the virtual environment psychological and physically. Singapore: Couple of projects will be exhibited in the virtual environment, the learners will be immersed into the Singapore’s virtual educational system as a virtual Singapore’s student to understand the function of projects plays in Singapore’s educational system. Canada: A virtual environment which contains couple of schools with different characteristic will be exhibited in the virtual environment, the learners will be immersed into the environment to understand the role of site-based management in Canadian education system.