How Real is Virtual? Comparing a Real and Virtual Landscape Mapping Experience
Abstract
Over the last few years, the Virtual Landscape Project has created screen-based virtual reality landscapes, using the Unity 3D game engine, to enhance the training geoscience students receive in preparing for fieldwork and to provide accessible parallel provision for students unable to partake directly in fieldwork. Students explore these landscapes as they would real ones, interacting with virtual outcrops to collect data, determine location, and map the geology. Student and staff response to these landscapes has been positive and the landscapes are widely used online where they are freely available at http://www.see.leeds.ac.uk/virtual-landscapes/. Whilst our early focus was on creating modelled landscapes used to show specific geological problems, the next step was to recreate a real world location. This opportunity came with the research project Embedding and Sustaining Inclusive STEM Practices, sponsored by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (now the Office for Students). This project included a case study of an accessible field trip to Anglesey, NW Wales. For this, we created a virtual landscape of the Rhoscolyn headland on Anglesey where students undertook a day's mapping. The headland includes steep and uneven terrain and whilst part is accessible from a wheelchair, much of it is not. Those students unable to access the area fully used the virtual landscape to complete the exercise. This has allowed us to compare directly the use of the virtual landscape, both as a learning tool and as an experience, with that of the field-based practice. We present and discuss preliminary findings from this project, and consider the implications for improving the use of virtual reality in geoscience fieldwork, and the geosciences more generally. This type of real virtual landscape also has great potential for use in public engagement and we have already had interest from government agencies who would like to use the technology in this respect.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMED31A..06H
- Keywords:
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- 0805 Elementary and secondary education;
- EDUCATIONDE: 0815 Informal education;
- EDUCATIONDE: 0845 Instructional tools;
- EDUCATIONDE: 0850 Geoscience education research;
- EDUCATION