Abstract:

The brain is one of the most complex and important organ in humans, and it is responsible for several essential functions in our body. As a novel field in science, most comprehension and knowledge in mammalian brains has been discovered in the past two decades. However, to simulate human brain more conveniently and rapidly, model organisms such as Drosophila Melanogaster, a type of fruit fly, have been often used as research objects. Unfortunately, as a complex and unsolved science subject, relativity fewer people are able to get in touch with brain objects and brain science. Nowadays, virtual reality (VR) is a state-of-the-art medium that provides immersive and interactive 3-D experiences to users. Previous studies indicate the features of the VR might bring better learning efficiency or more presence with situated learning performance than the conventional medium.

Thus this preliminary study aimed to explore the feasibility of using the VR as a learning communication system for the public in the brain science.

An online survey was conducted, including a 5-point-Likert-scale questionnaire and open-ended questions from the perspectives of learning content and VR medium. We expected to know the concepts and interests of the public in brain science field or brain related research in fruit fly, as well as their previous experience in using VR and willingness of using the VR system for knowing more about brain science. Eventually, a total of 330 valid questionnaires were collected in 2 weeks, from 17 January to 1 February 2020.

The results indicate that in the brain science content aspect, on an average, their knowledge and concept of brain science got 2.8 out of five. Overall, most participants wanted to know more about brain science applications (3.0/5) but least of them were familiar with the fruit fly brain research (2.5/5).

The topics that participants were most interested in brain science are basically related to applications in mnemonics and its mechanism, and artificial intelligence.
In VR aspect, up to 59% of the participants had experienced VR before. Most of them liked VR and gave their VR perceptions as a medium of presence, novelty, and interactivity. However, 34% of the VR users felt motion sickness during the VR uses. Overall, 74% of the participants showed positive attitude in using VR system as a powerful tool for learning brain science.

According to the feedback from the participations, we conclude VR is considered to be a suitable system to deliver brain science knowledge to the public. Moreover, based on the results analyses, we are working on the VR system design and development. We hope to present the framework of our VR system design at the conference in the near future.

Keywords:

Virtual reality, Brain science, Learning communication.