A Case Study in Academic Teaching Combining Immersive Virtual Reality and LLM Agents to Experientially Teach Simulation Theory

New technologies unlock new possibilities for academic teaching. Virtual Reality (VR) makes teaching experiential, shifting from listening to firsthand experiencing. Large Language Models (LLMs) make teaching interactive, enabling dynamic scenarios. Here we focus on their combination - immersive VR scenarios with LLM agents. As a case-study we taught simulation theory - the question of whether we are living in a simulation. We created a VR simulation with an LLM agent and challenged students to convince it that it was living in a virtual world. We also had students watch volunteers perform this task, and challenged them to convince us that they were real. The students responded enthusiastically to the experience. It also decreased their belief that they could convince an avatar it was virtual or other humans that they are real. This case-study demonstrates the potential of combining VR and LLM-based avatar for academic teaching and for education in general.