The effectiveness of applying virtual reality to educational purpose

Abstract

Research Motivation The purpose of this thesis is to build a model to examine the impacts of subjects who experienced the virtual reality system made by Taiwan`s National Palace Museum and make a proof that apply virtual reality on museum exhibition will achieve the expected benefits. The beginning of research on virtual reality is starting from psychological therapy. For the purpose of knowing what effects virtual reality has and why virtual reality is effective, many researchers devoted to this subject related to the concept of presence [1]. In the past decades, the researches on presence are adequate and covers many dimensions: the cause of presence, the category of presence, measuring presence, the outcome of presence, experimental design about understanding or measuring the presence, questionnaire design. However, what other fields that virtual reality can be applied in? what are the details about actual utilizing virtual reality in a specific field? The researches on this subjects are insufficient. For example, there was a research talking about applying virtual reality to learning purpose is potential if the system can generate a high presence virtual environment, but it did not actually prove it for real world. This paper, with Taiwan`s National Palace Museum`s virtual reality system, we will develop a model to examine the impacts of technical and task factors on presence in virtual reality museum exhibitions and through the questionnaire to evaluate the subject`s performances. For knowing using virtual reality in museum exhibitions was valuable or not, we listed the three main targets. These targets means after subjects experienced the virtual reality, it would be achieved at least one of the following benefits. the first one, enhance the subjects` willingness of joining the exhibitions, the second, increase the interests of the exhibitions and the last, improve the knowledge of artifacts in the exhibitions. Overall, we would know whether the virtual reality of museum exhibitions could produce the expected outcomes. If not, how to adjust the technical and task factors and improve the system is the question we try to answer. Research Objective Based on the past experiences, the visitors of museums could be divided into two types. The persons have been very interested in the artifacts or the experts had related professional background knowledge. Another type was the persons who just went for fun or felt curiosity but did not really interested in the contents. For giving the first type visitors a better experience and enhancing the interests of second type visitors, Taiwan`s National Palace Museum had been starting its digital plan. The plan has been executed for several years and there have been many positive results and feedbacks. In recent years, the potential of virtual reality took the museum` s fancy and the museum tried to develop a museum exhibition virtual reality. Taiwan`s National Palace Museum developed a virtual reality system for its digital plan. The virtual environment includes artifacts like jade cabbage, paintings and script of ancient poetry. The subjects wear head-mounted display(HMD), hands with the controllers and broadcast the introduction of artifacts continuously. There is a little space subjects can walk around and the scenes in the virtual environment is just like visiting an exhibition in the museum. In the virtual environment with the viewpoint of the subject, the subject can see that their right hand with white gloves and left hand with a flashlight. There are two ways that the subject can control the virtual environment and every action represents the different interactions. Controller on the right hand corresponds to the virtual environment is the right hand wearing the white gloves. The controller has a button, when press the button direct to the specific artifacts, it means "grab" the artifacts if the thing can be picked up. If the artifacts in the virtual environment cannot be picked up, such as painting and script of poetry, pressing the button will not give any response. A subject can use right hand to pick up the jade cabbage and watch it in full view. The controller on the left hand corresponds to the virtual environment is the left hand with the flashlight. A subject can use the flashlight to scan the paintings or scripts, and it represents the subject press the button on the left hand controller. The artifacts scanned will become full-screen in front of the subjects, so subject can see the details. In order to know the outcomes of the museum exhibition virtual reality, we are going to build a model to figure it out. Therefore, we are going to find out the key factors that contributed to the presence and relationship between these variables and presence. Through the decades, the researches on finding out the factors that affects to presence was sufficient and many researchers tried to categorize these factors. Thus, there were so many taxonomies but some of them still had commonality. We use the Sheridan`s (1992) taxonomy to categorized these variables into three groups, technological, task- or context-based and user characteristics or individual. Technological and task-based view are focus on the system level. Technological view focus on how the virtual reality design affects the presence. Task-based view emphasize what contexts or tasks will contribute to presence. Except the technological and task-based variables mentioned above, individual differences are important to presence. The variances between individuals are huge and complex, including differences of personal characteristics, attitude toward to the technology, tendencies of paying attention or engaging in the virtual environment. it is difficult to take these views all. Thus, this paper will concentrate on system level, point in technological and task-based factors and examine the impacts of these factors. Presence is classified into personal presence, environmental presence, and social presence [2]. For the contexts of Taiwan`s National Palace Museum virtual reality, there did not include the element of social presence. For the reason that this paper just separated the presence into personal and environmental presence. We have three expected outcomes of this museum exhibition virtual reality, increasing the visitors` interests, improving the experience and learn more about the artifacts than before. Through the model, we want to know whether the system achieve these targets. The measurement is according to questionnaires fulfilled by subjects after they experienced the virtual reality. The measurement not only valid the model but also evaluate subjects` performance and the virtual reality can fulfill the expected outcomes or not. The details of the model will discuss in research framework paragraph. Model see the following Figure 1.{table presented} Literature Review In the past researches, there were so many factors contribute to presence, and many researchers try to categorize these factors. Sheridan (1992) identifies five factors contribute to presence [3]. Steuer, J. (1992) categorized three of them as technological factors: the extent of sensory information, control of sensors relative to environment, and the ability to modify the physical environment [4]. The other two are task-, or context-based: task difficulty, and degree of automation [3]. Zeltzner (1992) also provides three technological variables: autonomy (a qualitative measure of the ability of a computational model to act and react to simulated events and stimuli), interaction (the degree of access to model parameters at runtime), and presence (bandwidth of sensation) [5]. Naimark (1992) provides a six-category factors for realspace imaging and the taxonomy also from a technological view [6]. The definition of term "presence" is related to wide fields of researches. Lombard and Ditton identified six different explanations of presence: social richness, realism, transportation, immersion, social actor within medium, medium as actor [7]. Schloerb separated the presence into subjective presence and objective presence [8]. Heeter distinguishes between three different types of presence: personal presence, a measure of the extent to which the person feels like he or she is part of the virtual environment; social presence, refers to the extent to which other beings (living or synthetic) also exist in the virtual environment; environmental presence, refers to the extent to which the environment itself acknowledges and reacts to the person in the virtual environment [2]. There are still existing other researches about defining the nature of presence. Although these theories do not conflict, we have to pick one or converge approach some theories together when it is necessary to measuring presence. This paper uses the Heeter`s definition, differentiate personal presence, social presence and environmental presence. The measurement of presence in this paper is questionnaire. The presence questionnaire has been developed for several years and many of them were passed the validity test. So far we sort out the presence questionnaire and classified the questions to personal or environmental presence. The following are the presence questions we are going to use it to our questionnaire [12] [13] [14]. Personal Presence (1) I was aware of the world.