Immersive VR Content for Effective Cyberbullying Prevention

The number of cyber-bullying cases and crimes is increasing every year in proportion to the Internet usage of people worldwide. Our society is trying to prevent cyber bullying by implementing education; however, this is not enough to attract people's attention, and the effectiveness of prevention education seems to be significantly inferior. In this study, we propose content that can help understand and empathize with the situation from the perspective of cyber bullying victims by utilizing the advantages of virtual reality, which provides a high sense of immersion to users. Unlike existing virtual reality contents, we tried a format that interacts with the controller simultaneously by combining a mouse rather than experiencing it only using a controller. Depending on the scenario, it is designed to attract the interest of the trainee by adding an interactive element. Thirty adult men and women who had received cyberbullying prevention education from the Ministry of Education during their school years participated in the survey. The results indicated that the proposed virtual reality cyberbullying prevention education was more effective than traditional cyberbullying prevention education. Utilizing virtual reality to raise awareness of cyberbullying and enhance the effectiveness of prevention education demonstrates its potential applicability in other educational fields.