Lessons Learned in Transferring a Lecture on Virtual Reality into Immersive Virtual Reality

Abstract

Immersive virtual reality offers novel approaches on live-teaching by challenging the idea of the physical classroom. Here we present our experiences and learnings from our work-in-progress on transferring a real-life lecture about immersive virtual reality to the medium itself, employing a custom-implemented social virtual reality application. We highlight how students benefit from virtual lectures through a higher form of student participation and individual customisation, employing learning frameworks in accordance with the specificities of virtual reality like experiential learning and game-based learning. In addition, we show how the custom virtual environment allows to exploit the pedagogic potential of virtual reality to a great extent by enabling to intervene and control a virtual classroom at a deeper level and to respond to evaluations quickly and in an iterative incremental way, especially in comparison to currently available public social virtual reality platforms.