Designing immersive virtual reality stories with rich characters and high interactivity to promote learning of complex immunology concepts
Lei Zhang, Doug A. Bowman · 2021 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW) · 2021
Immunology concepts taught at the college level often involve complex factual and process-based knowledge and can be difficult for students to visualize and relate to. To promote students' understanding of specific immunology concepts and increase their learning motivation and engagement, we leveraged the strengths of immersive storytelling and virtual reality (VR) interactivity and created a guided interactive and immersive VR storytelling experience with rich characters and engaging narratives. The experience builds on immunology concepts of a specific type of white blood cell called neutrophils, and it takes students on an exciting journey inside the human body by embodying the cell and fighting pathogens. In this demo paper, we will describe the design of a working prototype of the VR application.