In-Class Evaluation of a Virtual Reality Laboratory for Civil Engineering Education

Virtual laboratories can offer increased availability and flexibility for students along with alleviating scaling issues within educational institutions. Virtual Reality (VR) depicts an interesting option because it can place users into computergenerated environments and allows interactive experiences with increased immersion and presence. Although hardware devices for VR are available off-the-shelf and possess a variety of functionality, the actual realization and integration into an existing course remain challenging. In particular, students should not only be able to gain knowledge and skills in the created virtual environments, but they should be able to transfer these to real-world scenarios. We aim to virtualize a specific physical laboratory for civil engineering (CE) using VR and concurrently demonstrate the entire workflow from the didactic concept, prototype design and implementation up to the evaluation of the lab by CE students. The virtual laboratory (DigiLabVR) is centered on the construction of reinforced concrete beams, requiring custom interaction along a series of different stations. Developing relevant VR content tailored to engineering education is usually complex and resource-intensive. To address this challenge within a small team, DigiLabVR was developed in two stages using a commercial game engine and piloted in two different scenarios. The first pilot was conducted with students from other disciplines and served mainly to obtain general feedback and to drive the development process. The second one was conducted within a regular CE class using an updated and extended prototype. While the first pilot demonstrated increased student motivation, the second one showed reduced temporal effort in comparison with the baseline approach. The feasibility of employing a VR laboratory for this specific course could be confirmed, and VR in such a context was well received by the students. As this first in-class pilot represented content-wise a rather introductory level, notable knowledge gains could not be observed and student feedback indicated a need for instructions at a more advanced level.