Exploring a desktop virtual reality application for education: the perspectives of spatial knowledge acquisition and information integration

Current practice in education encourages students to gain exposure in the real world through student visits (i.e., field trips) to sites such as process facilities (for engineering students), forests (for forestry students) and islands (for landscape architecture students), in addition to traditional textbooks and lectures. This exposure helps students to experience real world situations and integrate this experience into knowledge learned in class. This is important to students in various disciplines such as engineering, architecture and transportation. Students, however, have limited on-site access due to issues related to safety concerns, cost and effort. In an attempt to address such issues, Virtual Reality (VR) applications have been developed and implemented. With the growth in the number of VR applications, there is currently a lack of information about the design issues of VR applications, be it from the perspective of acquiring spatial understanding of complex environments or from the perspective of integrating different types of information related to the real world. This thesis aims to bridge this gap by evaluating VR applications with respect to these issues and highlights the lessons learned from the relevant evaluations. The results demonstrate that VR application, which links different sources of information (as developed in this thesis), promotes better learning than conventional printed materials and that students perceived it positively as a valuable complement to a physical field trip. Further findings indicate that a cut-away map (i.e., 2.5D map) is an ideal approach to assist with spatial understanding of complex environments. The design recommendations for the development of similar VR learning applications are further discussed in this thesis