Immersive Virtual Reality for Presence, Empathy, and Situational Interest

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 29
  In Roundtable Session: Virtual Reality and Robotics in Teaching and Learning

Abstract

This study explored the use of immersive virtual reality (VR) for college students’ history learning. With the potential of a first-person narrative delivered through a head-mounted display (HMD), it was expected that immersive VR would provide highly engaging embodied experiences that can impact the way students interpret historical events, which may influence students’ development of historical empathy and situational interest. From a preliminary analysis with the data collected from 17 college students, we found a trend favoring the use of immersive VR in increasing students' empathy, spatial presence, and situational interest. Also, those three constructs were found to have positive relationships among each other. These results were interpreted based on previous studies on immersive VR and the embodied cognition perspective.

Authors

• Insook Han, Temple University

• Timothy Patterson, Temple University