Virtual Reality and Education

Introduction Background One of the challenges in working with instructional media is that developers and educators are confronted with a rapidly moving target in terms of information technology's capabilities. The business and entertainment sectors are driving a fast-paced evolution of the devices people have in their workplaces and homes. Researchers and educators are scrambling to assess the potential, develop pedagogical strategies, create instructional materials, and implement a school-based infrastructure for today's technologies— only to find that computers and communications are " morphing " into new media of even greater power. Students of today experience a society and a workplace that is entirely different from those that their parents faced. To allow educational tools to fall behind the pace of technological advance is to sell out a generation of learners. People's understanding of what computers can do has shifted dramatically as the size and cost of these devices has decreased while their power has grown. First, computers were seen as number-crunching machines, then came data processing, now we live in the age of tools that manipulate symbols and information. Virtual Reality (VR) research is based on the growing certainty that the next evolutionary stage is computers and telecommunications fusing into virtual environments. " Cyberspace " is not simply a channel within which content flows, but a virtual place to live that competes directly with reality for the attention of many, especially new generation of students. For this reason, charting the strengths and limits of virtual reality is vital for educational technology. 2 Educating children now and in the future to live in an information society is critical. There is also a need to provide lifelong education for all citizens and to support a flexible workplace. VR technology has been widely proposed as a major technological advance that has potential to support for such education. There are several ways in which VR technology is expected to assist learning. Most importantly it allows students to visualize abstract concepts, to observe events at atomic or planetary scales, and to visit environments and interact with events that distance, time, or safety factor make unavailable. The types of activities supported by this technology promote current educational thinking that students are better able to master, retain, and generalize new knowledge when they are actively involved in constructing that knowledge in a hand on learning environment. There is evidence that, in suitable application areas, VR can offer an …