Virtual Reality Applications for Higher Educations: A Market Analysis

Abstract

Benefits and applications of virtual reality (VR) in higher education have seen much interest both from research and industry. While several immersive VR applications for higher education have been described, a structured analysis of such applications on the market does not exist. We use design elements from research for applying VR in higher education to analyze available VR apps. The analyzed VR applications were acquired from pertinent online stores to capture the market's state. We analyze the current picture of the available apps by categorizing them based on design elements and learning content. The aims are to map what types of apps are available, to study what expected types cannot (yet) be found, to compare the current state of the literature and the educational VR app market, as well as to scrutinize the most frequently used design elements for VR in education.

Proposing Design Principles for Sustainable Fire Safety Training in Immersive Virtual Reality

“…Historically, researchers within the IS field, such as Walsh & Pawlowski [15, p. 297], once pointed out that IVR is "[…] a technology in need of IS research", whereas most seminal IS studies [e.g., [16][17][18] have focused on virtual worlds or environments rather than IVR technology. Moreover, recent IS studies [6] [ [19][20][21] emphasize IVR technology from a broader perspective of education and learning, rather than safety training in particular. In other interrelated fields however, such as human-computer interaction (HCI), engineering, and educational sciences, several studies [10-13] [22-24] stress the importance of advancing the scientific discourse on VR and safety training, especially with an emphasis on producing prescriptive knowledge such as design principles.…”

“…In the educational sciences, formative features of learning are considered as feasible for evaluating training performance and learning [6]. The formative approach is also desired to incorporate into IVR training/learning environments [19][20], so that instructors and participants can inspect and evaluate critical factors of the training process. Hence, allowing the users to inspect fire hazardousness, its implications for the chain of cause-and-effect around (e.g., fire, smoke, and how to handle it onboard a train), is a feature that the IVR environment needs to implement for instant evaluation (during the training session) and post evaluation (after the training session) [9] [41].…”

Towards Routinely Using Virtual Reality in Higher Education

“…The authors conducted three design workshops with different groups of experts and derived a set of design insights that inform the design of agent-based VR learning environments from a human-computer interaction perspective. Furthermore, a recent analysis of VR app stores provides a comprehensive overview of VR learning apps already available on the market [10]. The authors concluded that available apps were mostly designed as short-term learning units that can be used more as a supplement to traditional lectures.…”

“…Note that by the time of testing, there were only few apps for learning targeting higher education in the Oculus Quest VR app market [10], and especially for specialized topics such as cybersecurity. Thus, prior to the testing, we conducted preparation works and came up with the idea of watching 360°videos related to cybersecurity on the headset, which were accessible, but did not go into as much technical depth on the cybersecurity topic.…”

“…We describe in this work three research cases from different study programs based on our project on VR in higher education. Although these are experimental, their embedding in the project combined with prior work on literature [6], learning [4], and the market for VR in higher education [10], allows us to draw conclusions. We offer these in the form of recommendations for educators, who soon hopefully can routinely use VR to offer students a richer learning experience.…”