Immersive Virtual Field Trips with Virtual Reality in Construction Education: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Field trips or site visits provide valuable learning opportunities in construction education. However, traditional field trips often face challenges such as accessibility, logistics, weather, safety, to name a few. The recent global pandemic and its stipulations on social distancing add another layer of complexity to implement. Alternative field trips such as virtual field trips (VFTs), which are usually enabled by technology innovations, can help overcome these barriers. Previous VFT researchers shared promising results in providing a rich learning experience to students while also noting the lack of robustness and immersiveness. This study aims to develop a prototype of an immersive VFT solution with virtual reality (VR) to facilitate field knowledge transfer in construction education. The paper presents the VFT development process and shares preliminary results of student learning and user experience data from the first prototype. Findings of this pilot study suggest that a key advantage of VFTs over traditional field trips resides in the opportunity of learning iteration, which is essential to successful knowledge acquisition in the cognitive learning domain. The preliminary analysis on the correlation between student performance and media types of information also provides insights into future VFT design based on the multimedia learning framework.