Virtual Reality in Education: On-line Survey
Daniel Fällman Department of Informatics Umeå University

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VR to Facilitate Learning and Understanding

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For educational purposes, Virtual Reality (VR) has been proposed as a technological breakthrough that holds the power to facilitate learning. Though, we find most efforts within the VR community focusing on applications designed to fulfill purposes of training, such as vehicle simulators, medical and military training. While not at all unimportant, we believe it is also adequate to explore, discuss and survey how VR is being and could be used to help students develop understanding and more proper mental models of complex systems and processes, abstract models and other non-intuitive material. We believe that VR may be used to support complex understanding by stimulating and exploring all human senses whereas traditional notions of learning tend to focus on purely intellectual skills. This survey is intended to capture the field of VR in education, where we especially emphasize on the use of VR where the focus is not solely that of training, but rather on the use of multisensory virtual environments to mediate understanding. It consists of short texts, links to projects, research groups, journals and conferences, and a list of references on the topic with comments to what we find to be key readings in the field. (Last updated: Fall 2000)