A review of the use of virtual reality head-mounted displays in education and training

Abstract

In the light of substantial improvements to the quality and availability of virtual reality (VR) hardware seen since 2013, this review seeks to update our knowledge about the use of head-mounted displays (HMDs) in education and training. Following a comprehensive search 21 documents reporting on experimental studies were identified, quality assessed, and analysed. The quality assessment shows that the study quality was below average according to the Medical Education Research Study Quality Instrument, especially for the studies that were designed as user evaluations of educational VR products. The review identified a number of situations where HMDs are useful for skills acquisition. These include cognitive skills related to remembering and understanding spatial and visual information and knowledge; psychomotor skills related to head-movement, such as visual scanning or observational skills; and affective skills related to controlling your emotional response to stressful or difficult situations. Outside of these situations the HMDs had no advantage when compared to less immersive technologies or traditional instruction and in some cases even proved counterproductive because of widespread cybersickness, technological challenges, or because the immersive experience distracted from the learning task.

Head-Mounted Display Virtual Reality in Post-secondary Education and Skill Training

“…There has also been an increase in available software that runs on HMD VR, yet research on what is utilized in academic settings is ever changing and upgrading. An update to understand the "how and for what" aspects of virtual technology, affecting performance in academia, has been recommended (Jensen and Konradsen, 2018). This state-of-the-art review observes the disciplines, methods and theories in post-secondary practice that features the use of immersive VR.…”

“…Perhaps VR's biggest obstacle to being accepted into post-secondary education systems is its psychometric validation, where stakeholders must carefully judge the degree to which virtual environments offer training in skills that can be obtained in other less expensive or complex modalities, which are free from simulator sickness (Parsons, 2015). There are two obstacles that inhibit the adoption of immersive VR into post-secondary education: (a) Software-There is a lack of applicable content for each discipline and most of what is available is mainly marketed toward selflearners, (b) Hardware-HMDs default to being entertainment systems that were not originally intended for classroom use (Jensen and Konradsen, 2018).…”

“…This review did not assess the quality of each study's experimental design as found throughout the literature, however a review conducted by Jensen and Konradsen (2018) reported the quality assessment of 21 HMD VR experiments, showing a "below average quality" as outlined by the Medical Education Research Study Quality Instrument. Jensen and Konradsen identified in 2018 a number of setups where HMD VR is useful for skill training including the training of cognitive skills related to spatial and visual knowledge, psychomotor skills related to head-movement, visual scanning, observational skills, and affective control of emotional response to stressful or difficult situations.…”

Games on Mobiles via Web or Virtual Reality Technologies: How to Support Learning for Biomedical Laboratory Science Education

“…Schools and educators embrace digitalization and new technologies, but they often struggle with choosing the right technology and strategy for achieving better digital support for students' learning [1][2][3]. There is much negative experience associated with digitalization processes of education: price, hidden costs, extra resources needed for the introduction, and a lack of clear guidelines [4].…”

Virtual Museums as a New Type of Cyber-Physical-Social System

“…In the era of the 'museum experience' in which the visitor is seems as a consumer, visitors' satisfaction is crucial to support museums continuity [9]. With the recent advancements in technology, museums have started using smart phones, tablets and VR to support and enhance their visitor's experience, introducing the concept of Virtual Museums [1]. Virtual museums refer to the "digital spatial environment, located in the WWW or in the exhibition, which reconstructs a real place and/or acts as a knowledge of a metaphor, and in which visitors can communicate, explore and modify spaces and digital or digitalized objects" [2], and have drawn a lot of interest over the past few years [1,[3][4][5][6][7].…”