Immersive Virtual Field Trips with Virtual Reality in Construction Education: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Field trips or site visits provide valuable learning opportunities in construction education. However, traditional field trips often face challenges such as accessibility, logistics, weather, safety, to name a few. The recent global pandemic and its stipulations on social distancing add another layer of complexity to implement. Alternative field trips such as virtual field trips (VFTs), which are usually enabled by technology innovations, can help overcome these barriers. Previous VFT researchers shared promising results in providing a rich learning experience to students while also noting the lack of robustness and immersiveness. This study aims to develop a prototype of an immersive VFT solution with virtual reality (VR) to facilitate field knowledge transfer in construction education. The paper presents the VFT development process and shares preliminary results of student learning and user experience data from the first prototype. Findings of this pilot study suggest that a key advantage of VFTs over traditional field trips resides in the opportunity of learning iteration, which is essential to successful knowledge acquisition in the cognitive learning domain. The preliminary analysis on the correlation between student performance and media types of information also provides insights into future VFT design based on the multimedia learning framework.

Virtual Tours to Facilities for Educational Purposes: A Review

“…Industrial Environments [30] simulated industrial company for the artisan manufacture of chocolates [31] phases of cheese production [32] a machine-building plant [6] Université Laval, central heating plant and mechanical rooms in buildings [33] A typical charcoal mini-blast furnace (CMBF) plant in Brazil [34] An assembly Line Labs [35] Guided virtual tour of a university laboratory [25] The Photovoltaic (PV) Applied Research and Testing (PART) Lab…”

“…Pano2VR is a powerful virtual tour software that converts your panoramic or 360° photos and videos into interactive experiences [36], [37] HoloBuilder Capture, view, and control project progress with 360° photos, enabling teams to stay on schedule and on budget [35] Mozilla Hubs Online communities with a fully open-source virtual world platform [38] Cupix Deliver 3D digital twin platform to builders and owners [5], [28] Virtual Tour PRO, 3D Vista Create interactive 360º virtual tours in the easiest and most pleasant way: 360º views (panoramas), 360º videos, embedded sounds, videos and photos, floor plans, and fully customizable frames [5], [34] Google Cardboard Cardboard puts virtual reality on your smartphone [32] CAD to virtual tours Comos Walkinside A virtual reality platform for Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM) [33] Revit is used to design, document, visualize and deliver architecture, engineering, and construction projects [39] Game engine Unity Unity is the game engine that provided the platform for adding models, scripts, animations, and building the application [31], [34], [40] As described in Table 2, we can categorize software into four main types for constructing virtual tours: (i) software that transforms Panoramic (or 360) photos into virtual tours, (ii) software that transforms CAD models into virtual tours, (iii) general game engines, and (iv) 3D model viewers.…”