Immersive and Non-immersive Virtual Reality System to Learn Relative Motion Concepts

The focus of the current study is to understand the strength and limits of immersive virtual environments as a new media for learning and teaching relative motion concepts. Our results show that while training in both Immersive Virtual Environment (IVE) and Desktop (non-immersive) Virtual Environment (DVE) resulted in a significant improvement on relative motion problem solving test in general, the IVE group performed significantly better than the DVE group on solving two-dimensional relative motion problems after training in the simulations. This result supports our hypothesis that egocentric encoding of the scene in IVE (where the learner constitutes a part of a scene being immersed in it) as compared to allocentric encoding on a computer screen in DVI (where the earner is looking on the scene from "outside") is beneficial for studying two-dimensional problems.