Immersive Virtual Reality in Learning Sciences

Bailenson 2008
Bailenson, J.N., Yee, N., Blascovich, J., Beall, A.C., Lundblad, N., & Jin, M. (2008). The use of immersive virtual reality in the learning sciences: Digital transformations of teachers, students, and social context. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 17, 102-141.


Article describes how virtual environments enable transformed social interaction, the ability of teachers and students to use technology to alter their online representations and contexts in order to improve learning.


Taxonomy of VEs

-immersive virtual environment: perceptually surrounds the user, increasing his or her sense of presence or actually being within it.
           -While a kid is in an immersive virtual environment, the sensory information of this environment is       dominant than the outside world's sensory information.
-collaborative virtual environments: more than a single user; users interact via avatars.


Three implementation approaches: 

1- rewarding activities within the collaborative virtual environment, e.g., Quest Atlantis
2- task and reward within virtual environment
3-leveraging existing online environments



Embodied agents that teach and learn: virtual agents in the environment as a tutor,
or the agents encourage students to teach them and students can learn by teaching to the agents.
Co-learners: students learning in a social condition outperforms student learning individually.
Visualization: enhanced graphics help better understand the concepts
Synthesis of archived behaviors: storing and assimilating all actions performed by students or teachers, to create profiles.

Presence, immersion, and learning:  presence is a measure of the utility of a virtual environment (how 
the user actually feels as if he or she is present in the virtual environment)


Transformed social interaction

-three dimensions for transformations during interaction: self-representation, social-sensory abilities, and social environment.



Experiments done in the paper demonstrate that using digital transformations of teachers and
learners in collaborative virtual environment can increase learning compared to no transformations.
Experiment 1 demonstrated that teachers are better able to spread their gazes among students when receiving real-time visual feedback about which students they have been ignoring. 
Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that transforming the spatial configuration of a virtual classroom changes
how much students learn.