Immersive VR and Education: Embodied Design Principles That Include Gesture and Hand Controls

Abstract

This article explores relevant applications of educational theory for the design of immersive virtual reality (VR). Two unique attributes associated with VR position the technology to positively affect education: (1) the sense of presence, and (2) the embodied affordances of gesture and manipulation in the 3rd dimension. These are referred to as the two profound affordances of VR. The primary focus of this article is on the embodiment afforded by gesture in 3D for learning. The new generation of hand controllers induces embodiment and agency via meaningful and congruent movements with the content to be learned. Several examples of gesture-rich lessons are presented. The final section includes an extensive set of design principles for immersive VR in education, and finishes with the Necessary Nine which are hypothesized to optimize the pedagogy within a lesson.Keywords: immersive virtual reality, embodiment, gesture, stem education, mixed reality, VR, educational design, XR "Movement, or physical activity, is thus an essential factor in intellectual growth, which depends upon the impressions received from outside. Through movement we come in contact with external reality, and it is through these contacts that we eventually acquire even abstract ideas." (Montessori, 1966) THE TWO PROFOUND AFFORDANCESIn the early 1930's, Dr. Montessori understood that learning relied on how our physical bodies interacted with the environment. For her, the environment was physical. Today, we are able to digitize our environments and the affordances approach infinity. For several decades, the primary interface in educational technology has been the mouse and keyboard; however, those are not highly embodied interface tools (Johnson-Glenberg et al., 2014a). Embodied, for the purposes of education, means that the learner has initiated a physical gesture or movement that is wellmapped to the content to be learned. As an example, imagine a lesson on gears and mechanical advantage. If the student is tapping the s on the keyboard to make the gear spin that would be considered less embodied than spinning a fingertip on a screen to manipulate a gear with a synchronized velocity. With the advent of more natural user interfaces (NUI), the entire feel of digitized educational content is poised to change. Highly immersive virtual environments that can be manipulated with hand controls will affect how content is encoded and retained. One of the tenets of the author's Embodied Games lab is that doing actual physical gestures in a virtual environment should have positive, and lasting, effects on learning in the real world.

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