Virtual reality for enhancing spatial ability in Environmental Art Design Education

At present, the problem of weak spatial awareness is common in the education of environmental art design majors in colleges and universities, and there are few opportunities to train students in three-dimensional spatial ability in traditional education. The progress of virtual reality technology makes it possible for VR to enter the traditional classroom. This paper is an empirical study of the advantages of VR technology in environmental art and design education to verify whether the application of VR technology in classroom education can help to improve the spatial ability of college students to hopefully give some suggestions to peer educators. Therefore, in this study, we chose the traditional course of Decorative Arts and Construction Crafts and added the VR teaching model, and we used the pre-test and post-test quasi-experimental design of experimental and comparison group classes (N=68), and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVAS) using IBMSPSS software. The results showed that the VR technology-based course had a positive effect on improving the spatial ability of college students compared to the traditional classroom, in which the effect on mental rotation and spatial visualization ability was significant, in addition, this VR teaching model had a positive but insignificant effect on the improvement of spatial orientation ability.