Evaluating the Use of 360-Degree Video in Education

Virtual reality (VR) has existed in the realm of education for over half a century; however, it has never achieved widespread adoption. This was traditionally attributed to costs and usability problems associated with these technologies, but a new generation of consumer VR headsets has helped mitigate these issues to a large degree. Arguably, the greater barrier is now the overhead involved in creating educational VR content, the process of which has remained largely unchanged. In this paper, we investigate the use of 360∘ video as an alternative way of producing educational VR content with a much lower barrier to entry. We report on the differences in user experience between 360∘ and standard desktop video. We also compare the short- and long-term learning retention of tertiary students who viewed the same video recordings but watched them in either 360∘ or standard video formats. Our results indicate that students retain an equal amount of information from either video format but perceive 360∘ video to be more enjoyable and engaging, and would prefer to use it as additional learning resources in their coursework.