Enhancing cross‐cultural educational awareness: Experimental study on immersive experiences using virtual reality

Abstract The current cross‐cultural education still faces problems such as low awareness and ability in cross‐cultural education, low cultural sensitivity, shallow awareness of cross‐cultural differences and poor cross‐cultural ability to cooperate with others. The significance of this study lies in enhancing awareness and abilities in cross‐cultural education to improve the current state of cross‐cultural education and promote cross‐cultural communication and understanding. The paper used Unity to build a virtual scene, and then selected 120 college students as research subjects and divided them into three classes: virtual reality immersive experience group (Class 1); traditional learning group (Class 2); and flipped classroom group (Class 3). A comparative experiment was designed. The research results found that the average scores of cultural differences and cultural conflict sensitivity among students in Class 1 reached 89.33 and 91.54, respectively. The average scores of cultural differences and cultural conflict sensitivity among students in Class 2 were 73.68 and 76.26, respectively. The average scores of cultural differences and cultural conflict sensitivity among students in Class 3 were 78.05 and 77.00, respectively. In addition, the cognitive depth and adaptability to cross‐cultural cooperation of Class 1 students who use immersive virtual reality experiences are significantly better than those of the other two classes. The research results indicate that using immersive virtual reality experiences for cross‐cultural education can help improve students' awareness and ability in cross‐cultural education, increase their cultural sensitivity, enhance their cognitive level of cultural differences and enhance their cross‐cultural cooperation ability.