Tenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

There have been a number of recent investments by large organisations to incorporate online reality (VR) within their staff training programmes. This is done with a view to reducing or replacing costly or physically dangerous training scenarios. These innovations in training have been implemented on a large scale indicating confidence in the technology and for its perceived benefits. While this success is seen to be a rising trend within the enterprise sector, there has been a notable lack of immersive technology development for higher education where students are increasingly familiar with or actively using this technology in early education and at home. We are developing a VR application with collaboration from academics and tutors within Law to see how we can best translate paper-based legal narratives into engaging and challenging online environments where the students can choose to observe, respond and interact with legal proceedings. Our intent is to provide an innovative learning resource for a discipline (Law) that has been traditionally slow to implement new technology. We are aiming to observe and measure improvements in challenging areas such as student recruitment, confidence, retention, and attainment. During the development phase, we are testing and implementing features focused on visual and spoken narrative interaction such as voice recognition, AI-based avatars and VOIP. We will be observing the users’ reactions to the environment, and measuring the psychophysiological response of users in order to discover what might constitute a good user experience and learning outcome within a online environment.