A study on the design and application of desktop virtual reality resources in teaching geography in secondary school

The swift advancement of information technology has rendered virtual reality (VR) in education a focal point of research. Nonetheless, research on desktop VR's impact on cognitive load and the enhancement of spatial abilities remains inadequate. This study utilized "Earth's Movement and Climate Change" as a case study, created desktop VR resources with the Unity3D game engine, and subsequently enlisted 24 junior high school students (12 male and 12 female) to conduct a single-group pre- and post-test experimental investigation. The study revealed that the utilization of desktop VR resources markedly enhanced students' spatial abilities and geography knowledge scores, with greater improvements observed in the lower subgroups. The low subgroup had a markedly greater extrinsic load than the high subgroup, indicating that interface complexity may impose an additional strain on low-level learners. The research indicates that desktop VR can efficiently facilitate the figurative representation of abstract concepts in geography education; however, the interface design requires optimization to mitigate cognitive strain.