An Analytical Study of Cross-Cultural Design Factors Affecting Virtual Reality Teaching Experience

ABSTRACT

Objectives: With the COVID-19 epidemic, more and more schools are choosing online education and electronic devices for learning. Due to the uniqueness of the VR model, many teachers are introducing the use of VR in educational teaching activities. Generally speaking, virtual reality is widely used in the field of education and training because of its potential to promote interactivity and motivation. It also offers a new approach to teaching and learning due to the increasing number of online learners sharing and presenting educational content, and the technological possibilities of spreading knowledge over the global web and allowing students to participate in educational courses remotely. Therefore, this study focuses on relevant design factors through the study of teaching scenarios such as VR experience teaching training in the field of product design. In the preliminary questionnaire survey, we concluded that the three key words that students care most about VR teaching tools are user interface, usability and interaction design, but from the questionnaire survey we cannot accurately understand the specific preferences of students for these three factors. Therefore, we want to understand specifically whether students care more about user interface, usability, or interaction design for VR teaching tools, that is, which of these three factors will be more preferred and valued by students, in order to consider how to weigh the three factors in the VR design and production process. By studying the design factors of VR teaching and learning experiences, VR educational content developers can better understand the factors to be considered in this field. It can also guide VR content producers to produce more content that meets students’ needs. Methods: In this study, firstly, 80 questionnaires were mainly used to organize and collect the key words of relevant factors, and after the key words were obtained, the AHP tool was used to obtain the hierarchical model, and then according to the 1–9 scale method, 10 experts in the design field and 10 students were invited to score the three design factors of VR teaching tools in a two-by-two comparison, and finally the weight values were analyzed and organized according to the AHP calculation formula. Finally, the weight values were analyzed and sorted according to the AHP formula to determine the ranking of the weight values of the design factors of VR teaching tools. Results: The AHP method is used to study the factors that influence students in the design and production of VR courses and software, and to form a hierarchy in which different factors are sequentially generated. Designers and content producers can determine the relative importance of each factor in the hierarchy through pairwise comparisons. Based on the results, we can find that user interface is the most important VR design factor that students are concerned about, followed by interactivity. The findings can be used as a framework tool to design VR content according to students’ needs and make the product a better experience. Conclusions: According to the results, we can find that the user interface is the VR design factor that students are most concerned about, followed by interactivity, which also gives us a hint that when we are making VR teaching tools, we should pay more attention to the design and presentation of VR content, choosing appropriate VR materials, materials that are closer to the real world, and at the same time designing more beautiful, simpler, and more obvious buttons or The interface should be designed with more beautiful, simple and obvious buttons or prompts. The user interface is also important, when students enter the virtual reality, they want to be as in the real world in general scenes, rather than poor quality 3D production of animation graphics, virtual reality to provide students with a realistic reproduction of the world, where they can operate, learn, practice and even experiment, and designers to do is to provide them with as much as possible to meet the needs of the VR tools. Similarly, interactivity is also important in this process. If you can only watch, but not effectively interact with VR as if it were reality, then VR is obviously inappropriate. Therefore, the weighting of these three factors will hopefully provide some meaningful inspiration to the designers of VR teaching tools. When students use VR educational products, it is very important for VR content providers and VR designers to improve the actual value of the product content, as it can help them design VR educational products that better meet the market demand. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.