The expansion of the real environment through digital content and the immersion in virtual worlds have increasingly found their way into different areas of life and work in recent years. For the visualization of complex subjects, for modeling and simulation, teaching and learning as well as collaboration and communication, virtual and augmented reality opens up new perspectives in research.
The focus is not only on the development of the corresponding technologies. Our research focuses on technical, didactical, and user-based determinants from the perspectives of teachers and learners, content authors, and domain experts. Based on the human-centered design approach, future users are involved in all phases of development.
Focuses
Develop authoring tools for immersive media that enable technical non-experts to create, prepare, and deploy content quickly and easily.
Development and testing of didactic concepts for AR and VR that support explorative, individualized, but also collaborative learning of abstract concepts.
Usability evaluates how users can perform a certain task or use a certain application area and is a component of user experience. Research is conducted into various factors that influence usability, such as the structure, navigation, and design of a product.
Areas of Application
In the AR/VR.nrw project Figments.nrw, an open authoring tool for virtual reality is being realized and tested. In addition to these tools, with which anyone can create VR content free of charge, the source code is published under a public license.
In the project KoLBi - Kohärenz in der Lehrer*innenbildung (Coherence in Teacher Education) - a partial focus is on the creation of modules with which student teachers are taught the use of VR in the classroom from both a didactic and a technological perspective.
Analysis of the influence of user experience, usability, and strain on motivation and performance of users of VR learning applications.
