Entwurf eine Virtuellen Lernwelt

This diploma thesis deals about the didactic potential of Virtual Reality and the technological requirements for the design of Virtual Learning Environments (VLE). Because the main focus lies on the problem of how to design VLEs which could be used in schools, at first the reader gets an comprehensive insight into didactic principles in general as well as into the most common learning theories with special regards to E-Learning. The paper further includes a discussion about popular examples of modern VLEs and a detailed description of current results of the research in this field. Although the study of educational science shows, that there does not exist the one and only answer on how to integrate curricular given contents into virtual worlds, in the course of this thesis a conceptual UML-based framework was developed, which on the one hand provides the basic ideas of how to design VLEs. On the other hand it is based on the insight, that besides real time rendering, immersion and interaction virtual worlds must contain a forth dimension (called narration), that provides the learner with some background information and structure in order to help him to understand the concepts and to build adequate mental models. Based on that framework a VLE for ages 12 to 14 about the medieval way to build churches was designed and implemented using the VR-system Avalon for stereoscopic rendering as well as a web-interface for remotely controlling navigation and object-manipulation in VR. Besides encapsulating the still quite difficult interaction with VR-input-devices the interface has the great advantage that it can provide the learner with additional textual and multimedia information in order to enhance his VR-experience