APPLICATION OF VIRTUAL REALITY FOR EDUCATION AT TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY

Technological development and practical application of innovative technical solutions within manufacturing and service companies have played a bigger and bigger role in recent years. Younger generations use mobile devices everyday and everywhere. Youth are used to constantly using their smartphones, laptops and tablets for communication and entertainment. The modern world leans on information which has to be transmitted quickly and simply. People are eager to read brief and limited content or watch short videos instead of listening to long lectures. They tend to write short messages and quickly find solutions to their problems. Such attitudes can also be observed in the area of education. The youngest generation of pupils and students often has problems with focusing for a longer time during lectures or classes which are given in a traditional way, leaving to the use of only oral presentations or blackboards. Due to this fact, the educational sphere should also strive to use modern technologies and apply them for teaching and making students get involved in classes and lectures. One of such technologies is Virtual Reality (VR). Currently, VR is associated mainly with entertainment, i.e. applications used for gaming. However, there is a wide range of possibilities of Virtual Reality usage and it refers to different spheres like industry, military, security, business, medicine and many more. Moreover, in the field of education there is great potential for VR technologies applications, especially in terms of laboratories and classes. The paper discusses the research on application of Virtual Reality for teaching students at technical universities. It describes the advantages of VR use for teaching purposes. It presents how to prepare an efficient teaching method that will let students obtain knowledge and increase their competences in the field of a given subject but also meet the university's educational requirements. The article shows the practical examples of supporting laboratories with Virtual Reality technology at one of the Faculties of Silesian University of Technology in Poland. The use of Virtual Reality can contribute to the improvement of the quality of education. It can help students with understanding, experiencing and imagining some phenomena in a better way compared to traditional methods. Academic teachers can transfer some part or even the whole class to the virtual world. It concerns both technical and non-technical subjects. In terms of subjects like mechanics or machine exploitation, VR lets students see a given machine in 3D, give them an insight into its construction and it can also put student in a situation in which they have to react to fix the broken part of a machine.