Designing Interactive Virtual Tours for Education: Two Case Studies on Virtual Tours of the Chemistry and Biochemistry Laboratories
Max Chen, Dashiell Elliott, Robert E. Dempski, Raúl Orduña Picón · 2024
The demand for remote learning and virtual tours increased significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic. While virtual reality training simulations and digital twins have been used in educational settings for a long time, user-friendly methods of designing effective simulations and digital twins have been less studied. Our study adopts the research through design (RtD) framework and the virtual tours iterative development model (VT-IDM) to explore the possibilities and challenges in designing and creating virtual tours for laboratories. In this paper, we present two case studies on virtual tours built with the Matterport platform in the chemistry and biochemistry laboratories to demonstrate how to enact the discovering and designing phases from the first iterative cycle within VR-IDM. Further, we provide a discussion on adopting game design concepts in our design principles. Our work contributes to using and adapting off-the-shelf technology for developing evidence-based serious games for educational purposes.