Improving Physics education through different immersive and engaging laboratory setups

Abstract

Virtual and remote laboratories have been shown as valuable tools to support learners in understanding concepts. They provide an experimentation space in a safe, remote, and flexible way. However, the missing realism and lack of hands-on experience are often pointed out as a downside. This can also be described as a missing feeling of immersion and presence. Emerging virtual reality tools providing full-body tracking and even force-feedback when interacting with experiments support this sense of immersion and engage focused learning. Collaborative virtual setups additional add features to enable engaging discussions and social experiences. In this paper, we investigate learning experiences within a virtual laboratory environment in a room-scale virtual reality setup, a traditional screen-based solution, and mobile VR settings supporting multi-user setups. In two experiments setup as A/B studies, we investigate and compare the settings with a focus on comparing immersion, engagement, usability, and learning experience.