Abstract:

Many studies prove the value of Virtual Reality (VR) in Education: VR systems allow students to be active learners and increase their engagement, mostly thanks to the “sense of presence” they experiment and that can affect the way cognitive processes perform.

This paper reports a study aimed to deepen the concept of “presence” starting from the literature on the subject (as the works of Witmer and Singer and Slater) and testing that with students of a secondary school where VR is used both for learning and for developing digital materials.
While researchers have identify the main factors that affect the feeling of presence and have organized them in wide frameworks, the present research has the objective to identify what of them young people explicitly perceive and can describe with their words and what of them are more important in their opinion to obtain in VR the sense of presence.

In order to identify and measure the elements of presence in VR environment, we designed a three phases experience: firstly students are asked to answer a preparatory questionnaire aimed at figure out their habit in using virtual reality. Then a little group of students - after they completed a learning task using VR devices - are engaged in a focus group during which they are requested to express and discuss the elements they perceived as more important to describe the “sense of presence” they had experimented. Those elements will be linked with the elements of the literature framework and so it is possible to understand if some of them had not been perceived by the students and to investigate the level of perception of each. In the third phase a questionnaire based on validated questionnaires is given to a larger number of students. The questions are formulated on the basis of the Slater and Witmer and Stinger Presence Questionnaire and with the words used by the students during phase two.

The results are used to match the elements of the sense of presence experimented by students with the way cognitive processes performs during learning tasks.

References:
[1] Slater M. & Wilbur S. (1997). A framework for immersive virtual environments (FIVE): Speculations on the role of presence in virtual enviroments. Presence: Teleoperators and virtual environments.
[2] Witmer B. G. and Singer M. J., Measuring Presence in Virtual Environments: A Presence Questionnaire, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, PRESENCE: Virtual and Augmented Reality, Volume 7, Issue 3, June 1998, p.225-240.

Keywords:

Virtual Reality, sense of presence, Immersive Reality.