Low-Immersion versus High-Immersion Virtual Reality: Definitions, Classification, and Examples with a Foreign Language Focus

Since the beginning of the Digital Revolution in the 1950s, the influx of rapidly evolving technologies has posed a challenge to those trying to keep pace. This challenge is compounded by ever changing terms which can lead to confusion, including concepts related to virtual environments, virtual worlds, and virtual, augmented, or mixed realities. A detailed analysis of previous publications (e.g., Berti, 2019; Lin & Lan, 2015; Peeters, 2019) reveals that scholars have been using the same term, "virtual reality" (VR), to describe several distinct educational settings, ranging from low-immersion virtual environments (LiVR) to high-immersion three-dimensional spaces (HiVR). The intention of this manuscript is three-fold: (1) to define and classify the main types of VR, as they have been used in educational research, (2) to outline the differences between the two main types of VR, and (3) to provide examples of VR language learning research.