Immersive Technologies

Immersive Technologies for Teaching

Have you ever thought of applying Immersive Technologies to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your face-to-face teaching activities?

Immersive Technologies use virtual technology to create a lifelike industry environment and simulate a different real-life scenario to enrich the teaching content. For example, technology enables educators to create a diverse range of environments from hospitals, industrial plants, and construction sites allowing students to experience and prepare for stressful and demanding real-world situations.

The University's Areas of Excellence Committee (AoEC) has recognised the importance of technology and funded a joint proposal by five departments, including Industrial Centre (IC), Department of Applied Social Sciences (APSS), Department of Computing (COMP), Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) and Department of Rehabilitation Sciences (RS), to set up university-wide facilities in immersive technologies for teaching. The facilities include one large-scale 6-sided Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE), two standard 4-sided CAVE, one 3-sided LED CAVE, portable VR and MR headsets, one digital video production studio, and learning and teaching software.

What are Immersive Technologies?

xR is a collective term for immersive technologies, which consist of Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality.

1. Virtual Reality (VR): Use software to generate realistic images, sounds, and other sensations that represent an immersive environment and simulate a user's physical presence in this environment
2. Augmented Reality (AR): Overlay of computer-generated content on the real world that can superficially interact with the environment in real-time
3. Mixed Reality (MR): Combination of VR and AR

Can Immersive Technologies benefit my teaching?

Immersive Technologies benefit teaching activities in many ways:

Enhance Productivity

• Virtual Teaching and Learning (VTL) facilities improve the overall productivity and effectiveness of training that removes the boundaries of a physical classroom.
• The VTL facilities allows more flexibility in arranging for make-up classes.

Enhance Learning Experience

• Virtual reality creates a risk-free industry environment for training.
• Immersive learning enriches the student learning experience by creating a lifelike virtual industry environment.
• Simulation scenario enriches the student learning experience by introducing different real-life situations in training.

Enhance Learning Outcome

• Simulation scenario allows students to experience purposely built challenges to expand the breadth and depth of knowledge acquired from the training.

Enhance Learning Flexibility

• Pre-simulation training enables better student engagement. Student can first rehearse multiple times in a VR environment before performing the real task.

Empower Personalised Training Sessions

• By collecting user movement data from the training session in immersive learning, the exercises can be customized to meet each student's specific training needs.

How can I apply Immersive Technologies to my teaching?

Immersive Technologies are useful not only to engineering subjects and teaching.

Health Sector

Illustration and Study of Human Anatomy and Human Physiology

School of Nursing (SN) used Virtual Reality Head Mount Display and medical imaging software to demonstrate and manipulate human body parts in an virtual environment.

Subject
ABCT2326 Human Physiology
HSS2011 Human Anatomy

Benefits to teaching

1) Reduce costs incurred with replacing conventional teaching aid materials;

2) High reusability, agile teaching aid materials iteration; &

3) Enrich and expand the scope of teaching content through the creation of specific, non-standardized 3D models that replace traditional anatomy teaching aids.

Facilities used

HTC VIVE, D2P software

Construction Sector

Visualization and Study of Building Information Model (BIM)

Department of Building and Real Estate (BRE) used Mixed Reality Head Mount Display and Trimble Connect software to create a mixed reality content for as-design BIM model to as-built BIM verification. Virtual models such as MEP pipes could be visualized and detected onsite, thus, prevent any clash before the actual tender take place.

Subject
BRE470 Information Technology and Building Information Modelling for Construction

Facilities used
CAVE, HoloLens, HTC VIVE, Trimble Connect Software

Examples of Other Applications