Featured Article: Evaluating Smartphone-Based Virtual Reality to Improve Chinese Schoolchildren’s Pedestrian Safety: A Nonrandomized Trial

Abstract

Pedestrian safety training via smartphone-based VR provides children the repeated practice needed to learn the complex skills required to cross streets safely, and also helps them improve self-efficacy to cross streets. Given rapid motorization and global smartphone penetration, plus epidemiological findings that about 75,000 children die annually worldwide in pedestrian crashes, smartphone-based VR could supplement existing policy and prevention efforts to improve global child pedestrian safety.

Virtual reality in K‐12 and higher education: A systematic review of the literature from 2000 to 2019

“…Compared to K‐12 settings, higher education has experienced more extensive usage of VR technologies, especially in the fields of engineering and health and medicine. Engineering is a subject only offered in higher education curricula, and more topics are covered in health and medicine at university level than at K‐12 level; the latter mainly focuses on safety education, for example, pedestrian safety (McComas et al, 2002; Schwebel et al, 2018; Thomson et al, 2005), fire safety (Çakiroğlua & Gökoğlub, 2019; Padgett et al, 2006), and life skill development (Vogel et al, 2004). Furthermore, within the K‐12 context, VR‐based instruction was more commonly seen in elementary schools than middle or high schools, indicating educational researchers' keenness to explore its potential among younger students, particularly in the subjects of social science and safety education.…”

“…With projectors being replaced by organic light‐emitting diode (OLED) display panels in HMDs, the percentage of projector‐based VR showed a sharp decline in the literature (from 19% to 5%). Moreover, although no drastic changes were found in the percentage of studies on VR glasses, references to them changed over time from polarised 3D glasses (Kim, 2006; Smith et al, 2007) to mobile‐based VR viewers such as Google Cardboard and Gear VR (Moro et al, 2017; Schwebel et al, 2018; Xie et al, 2019). In addition, accessories such as joysticks, motion capture devices, and haptic gloves have seen increased usage in education as peripheral VR equipment in the last decade.…”

Effects of virtual reality on pain, fear and anxiety during blood draw in children aged 5–12 years old: A randomised controlled study

“…VR applications are used in many areas. In addition to pain and anxiety, VR has been used for the pharmacological stroke prevention and to teach patients about the results of atrial fibrillation (Balsam et al, 2018), stroke rehabilitation (Laver, George, Thomas, Deutsch, & Crotty, 2015), improving the skills for performing surgery (Piromchai, Avery, Laopaiboon, Kennedy, & O'Leary, 2015), nasogastric tube placement (Choi, 2017), nursing education (Farra, Smith, & Ulrich, 2017) and school children's pedestrian safety (Schwebel et al, 2018). VR can be used safely in the health care and education areas, and it is a useful application in reducing pain, fear and anxiety-particularly in children during invasive procedures and for increasing the success of procedure.…”

The Moderating Effect of Debriefing on Learning Outcomes of IVR-Based Instruction: An Experimental Research

“…The second issue is the lack of systematic comparison of knowledge and behavioral learning outcomes in IVR. For example, Taranilla et al (2019) used test questions to measure the degree to which knowledge was mastered by students [8], and Schwebel et al (2018) tested the effect of IVR on improving children's pedestrian performance by coding their street-crossing behaviors. Although the research results showed that learners improved their level of knowledge or behavioral performance, there was a lack of comparison in terms of the degree of improvement between the two [30].…”