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Book part
Publication date: 3 August 2017

Matt Bower

The ability for learners to interact online via their avatars in a 3-D simulation space means that virtual worlds afford a host of educational opportunities not offered by other…

Abstract

The ability for learners to interact online via their avatars in a 3-D simulation space means that virtual worlds afford a host of educational opportunities not offered by other learning technology platforms, but their use also raises several pertinent issues that warrant consideration. This chapter reviews the educational use of virtual worlds from a design perspective. Virtual-world definitions are explored, along with their key educational characteristics. Different virtual-world environments are briefly contrasted, including Second Life, Active Worlds, Open Sim, and Minecraft. A wide variety of virtual-world uses in schools and universities are examined so as to understand their versatility. Key educational benefits of virtual worlds are distilled from the literature, such as the ability to facilitate 3-D simulations, role-plays, construction tasks, and immersive learning. Emergent issues surrounding the use of virtual worlds are also analyzed, including cognitive load, safety, and representational fidelity. One higher education and one school level vignette are provided in order to offer more detailed insight into the use of virtual worlds in practice. Recommendations for learning design and implementation are presented, based on the thematic analysis of contemporary virtual-worlds research.

Details

Design of Technology-Enhanced Learning
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78714-183-4

Abstract

Details

Multi-Channel Marketing, Branding and Retail Design
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78635-455-6

Article
Publication date: 25 May 2021

Athira Azmi, Rahinah Ibrahim, Maszura Abdul Ghafar and Ali Rashidi

This paper aims to investigate the potentials of virtual reality (VR) for residential real estate marketing to influence house purchase intention.

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Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to investigate the potentials of virtual reality (VR) for residential real estate marketing to influence house purchase intention.

Design/methodology/approach

Based on the relevant literature in consumer behaviour, this study hypothesised the relationships between atmosphere with pleasure and arousal emotions and the subsequent influence of emotions towards house purchase intention in a virtual environment. A within-subjects experimental design was conducted with 60 real potential homebuyers to test the hypotheses. Data were analysed using paired samples t-test and partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM).

Findings

Results revealed that there is a significant difference in the atmosphere and house purchase intention between real and virtual environments. On the other hand, pleasure and arousal emotions evoked in real and virtual environments showed no significant difference. The results show that the atmosphere significantly affects pleasure and arousal, where pleasure, in turn, has a significant effect on purchase intention, and arousal showed an insignificant effect on purchase intention in the virtual environment.

Research limitations/implications

Due to budget limitation, this study was constrained to the use of HTC Vive as the VR equipment and evaluation of only one type of housing design.

Practical implications

This study contributes to facilitating the revitalisation of real estate marketing with the integration of VR by providing notable empirical results and recommendations based on the research findings.

Originality/value

This study extends the current knowledge from the stimulus-organism-response framework for a smart real estate marketing strategy using VR.

Details

Smart and Sustainable Built Environment, vol. 11 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2046-6099

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 29 May 2007

Setyawan Widyarto and Muhammad Shafie Abd. Latiff

The purpose of this paper is to explore the issue of using virtual tours to improve health and safety through preparatory familiarisation for visits to the swarming area. The main…

1083

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore the issue of using virtual tours to improve health and safety through preparatory familiarisation for visits to the swarming area. The main objective of the virtual environment system is path finding by commanding spatial skills.

Design/methodology/approach

Provides a case study of the area of Jamarat. One of the main ritual sites during the Hajj, in which Muslims stone the devil during the annual pilgrimage, will be unveiled from a virtual reality perspective and visual analytics.

Findings

The virtual environment built may help people interested in a virtual tour of the environment but have no opportunity to go due to limitations or may facilitate participants in pre‐departure preparation of a dangerous environment.

Practical implications

This paper's main issue is using virtual environments for virtual tours and discusses the principles of virtual environment creation and information extraction from available sources using a case study.

Originality/value

The development of the case study environment will be used for training purposes of the Hajj pilgrim candidates to avoid any possible fatal distraction.

Details

Facilities, vol. 25 no. 7/8
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0263-2772

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 17 August 2015

Deniz Yüncü

This paper aims to clarify the relationships between virtual destination environment factors and visitors’ satisfaction and loyalty. Virtual destination environment factors are…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to clarify the relationships between virtual destination environment factors and visitors’ satisfaction and loyalty. Virtual destination environment factors are based upon Kaplan and Kaplan’s preference matrix. Kaplan and Kaplan (1982) developed a preference matrix to describe how people use information to satisfy their needs of making sense and exploration in a physical environment. According to the model, while coherence and legibility help one to understand the place, variety and mystery landscape encourage exploration. Each of the factors can be associated with elements of the virtual destination environment.

Design/methodology/approach

The data were collected from 170 users who visited My Destination Barcelona Facebook page. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, as well as structural equation modelling (SEM) were used to analyze the data.

Findings

The study explored the relationships between virtual destination environment, satisfaction and loyalty based on the Kaplan and Kaplan’s preference matrix. According to the findings, when the virtual destination environment includes a variety of visuals and enough information related to the destination, and at the same time, when it includes environmental factors which stimulate curiosity, excitement and entertainment, the virtual destination environment will provide visitors’ satisfaction and loyalty.

Research limitations/implications

Several limitations of the present study should be mentioned. First, data from this study were collected from visitors of only one destination Facebook page (My Destination Barcelona) as a virtual destination environment. Second, although the sample size (N = 170) in the study seems enough for SEM, it is quite low. In addition, the use of a convenience sampling approach could decrease external validity. Thus, future studies should consider developing a systematic design to better represent the population.

Originality/value

This paper examines how online visitors perceive virtual destination environment and how perception directly influences visitors’ satisfaction feelings and indirectly affects their loyalty.

Details

Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Technology, vol. 6 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1757-9880

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 7 January 2014

Angela S.M. Irwin, Jill Slay, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo and Lin Lui

There is a clear consensus of opinion that virtual environments and virtual currencies pose a money laundering and terrorism financing threat. What is less clear, however, is the…

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Abstract

Purpose

There is a clear consensus of opinion that virtual environments and virtual currencies pose a money laundering and terrorism financing threat. What is less clear, however, is the level of risk that they pose. This paper aims to clarify the suitability of virtual environments for conducting money laundering and terrorism financing activities.

Design/methodology/approach

A number of experiments were conducted to estimate the quantity of funds that could be moved through these environments. These experiments took into account a number of factors such as the number of accounts that would need to be opened to launder/raise a specific amount of funds, the amount of funds that could be placed within a certain timeframe and the transaction limits imposed by each of the massively multiplayer online games and online financial service providers involved in the money laundering and terrorism financing scenarios.

Findings

The findings of this research show that money laundering and terrorism financing can take place inside virtual environments. Virtual money laundering and terrorism financing offer high levels of anonymity, potentially low levels of detection, and remove many of the risks associated with real-world money laundering and terrorism financing activity. However, this comes at the cost of ease, time and, in some cases, the amount of funds laundered. Large sums (millions of dollars) can be laundered in virtual environments, but this exponentially increases the level of effort involved in setting up accounts and placing, layering and integrating funds.

Originality/value

A number of authors have described potential virtual money laundering scenarios, but some of these are out-of-date due to closed loopholes, all are rudimentary and make no attempt to discuss the practicality or feasibility of using these scenarios. This research addresses those issues.

Details

Journal of Money Laundering Control, vol. 17 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1368-5201

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 24 August 2021

Ratna Candra Sari, Sony Warsono, Dwi Ratmono, Zuhrohtun Zuhrohtun and Hardika Dwi Hermawan

Previous research examined the effectiveness of virtual reality (VR) in various fields including engineering (Alhalabi, 2016), the military (Webster, 2016), robotic surgery (Bric…

Abstract

Purpose

Previous research examined the effectiveness of virtual reality (VR) in various fields including engineering (Alhalabi, 2016), the military (Webster, 2016), robotic surgery (Bric et al., 2016; Francis et al., 2020), firefighters (Çakiroglu and Gökoglu, 2019), negotiation training (Ding et al., 2020), health-care training (Chow et al., 2017) and ethics education (Sholihin et al., 2020). However, empirical research examining learning styles on the effectiveness of using VR is still scarce. VR has different characteristics from other learning media and high immersiveness in a VR environment can create a sense of presence that improves learning outcomes, except for students with certain learning styles who experience cognitive overload when exploring virtual environments (Hsu et al., 2017). Therefore, it is necessary to investigate to what extent learning styles can influence the effectiveness of VR-based learning on business ethics. This is because the effectiveness of business ethics education is indispensable along with the increasing cases of fraud and financial companies (PwC’s Global Economic Crime and Fraud, 2020).

Design/methodology/approach

Education must respond to the progress of information technology (IT) development by providing IT-based teaching methods to enhance the learning process. This is because the evolution of technology is changing student learning preferences from verbal to visual or even virtual (Proserpio and Gioia, 2007). VR is an IT-based learning media that creates a virtual environment which simulates the real world and provides concrete experiences, so students are able to actively explore their course material. VR technology is able to provide practical experiences without actually leaving home, so it is relevant for responding to the current situation due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Findings

Compared to traditional learning, VR is a more flexible learning method as it has no limitations of time, distance and space (Yu et al., 2007). The main characteristic of VR is immersion, interaction and imagination (Zhang et al., 2017) that improve cognitive performance in engineering (Alhalabi, 2016), the military (Webster, 2016) and surgical robots (Bric et al., 2016). VR-based learning can improve students’ learning abilities compared to traditional teaching (Jena, 2016). VR has already proven effective in teaching business ethics (Sholihin et al., 2020) because VR has the ability to create a virtual world, without any impact from socially reprehensible acts. With VR, students are able to understand scenarios about ethical dilemmas that occur in business practices, observe the potential consequences and make decisions to solve concrete situations where ethical dilemmas require a response. VR allows students to simulate situations virtually and develop their long-term experience. This is crucial because there is the possibility that in the near future the society will live in a mixed world (virtual and physical space).

Practical implications

A virtual environment that is able to evoke a sense of presence refers to the intensity of emotional involvement. Sense of presence can actually improve the learning results, but if the user lacks the ability to explore game tasks it will cause a cognitive overload that has a negative impact on learning outcomes (Hsu et al., 2017; Huang et al., 2020). Learning style preferences cause differences in cognitive load during the learning process using VR (Hsu et al., 2017). In a VR-based learning environment, students are required to explore the virtual environment; therefore, without navigation, students with active experimental learning styles are superior to students with passive or observing learning styles (Chen et al., 2005). Therefore, it is necessary to understand the impact of adopting VR technology to improve student’s performance by considering different learning styles.

Social implications

In Indonesia, the shift from offline learning to e-learning has created new academic pressures for some students (Pajarianto et al., 2020). The main challenge for educators is how to improve student’s learning outcomes and overcome the problem of using e-learning technology.

Originality/value

In light of the scarcity of research on the effectiveness of VR for teaching business ethics during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study fills the gap by extending the study of Sholihin et al. (2020) in that the authors establish the connection between user perception of the use of VR and learning style in relation to the effectiveness of VR.

Details

Interactive Technology and Smart Education, vol. 20 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1741-5659

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 July 2021

Jamie N. Mikeska and Heather Howell

This paper aims to examine three distinct aspects of authenticity that pre-service teachers (PSTs) experience when they engage with virtual classroom environments to develop their…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to examine three distinct aspects of authenticity that pre-service teachers (PSTs) experience when they engage with virtual classroom environments to develop their content-intensive instructional practice – task authenticity, student avatar authenticity and performance authenticity – and their perceptions about the usefulness of the simulated teaching experience to support their learning.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper explored these conceptions of authenticity and usefulness within a larger research study whose goal was to develop virtual environment tools to help elementary PSTs learn how to engage in one ambitious teaching practice: facilitating discussions that engage students in argumentation. To examine these aspects of authenticity and usefulness, this paper used a general qualitative deductive analysis approach to examine data from 104 interviews with 26 case study teachers and examined patterns in PSTs’ perceptions within and across interviews and authenticity aspects.

Findings

While these PSTs strongly value the utility of these tools to support their learning, findings point to variation in their perceptions of authenticity. Findings showed that most PSTs perceived the tasks as an authentic representation of the work of teaching. However, their perceptions of task authenticity did not always align with their perceptions of avatar or performance authenticity.

Originality/value

This paper argues that these three aspects of authenticity relate to, but expand upon, the broader notions of presence and plausibility noted in the literature on virtual environments and should be taken up more directly in future studies of users’ perceptions of virtual environments both within and outside of educational contexts.

Details

Information and Learning Sciences, vol. 122 no. 7/8
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2398-5348

Keywords

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 6 March 2017

Savvas Papagiannidis, Eleonora Pantano, Eric W.K. See-To, Charles Dennis and Michael Bourlakis

The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of users’ simulated experience in a virtual store and to show the subsequent impact of that experience on engagement. The…

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of users’ simulated experience in a virtual store and to show the subsequent impact of that experience on engagement. The outcome of that engagement is examined in relation to enjoyment, satisfaction and purchase intentions.

Design/methodology/approach

The method comprised an experiment comparing users’ perceptions of a standard 2D online clothing store with an enhanced, immersive one that aimed to provide shopping value approaching that of a traditional store by using a 3D experience where participants wore special glasses and a data glove.

Findings

Results demonstrate the major role of telepresence components in simulated experience and the critical role of that experience, along with hedonic and utilitarian values, in engagement. Purchase intention is influenced by satisfaction, which is in turn influenced by enjoyment and engagement. Engagement in turn is influenced by utilitarian and hedonic value and the experience of product simulation or telepresence, which is composed of control, colour and graphics vividness, and 3D authenticity. In the immersive, 3D environment, experience is more associated with engagement and enjoyment, leading to greater purchase intention. The immersive, 3D environment, thus, has the potential to rival traditional shopping in terms of experience, resulting in higher sales for retailers and satisfaction for consumers.

Originality/value

This work has evaluated a robust model of purchase intention and demonstrated it to hold not only in a 3D environment on a conventional computer platform, but also in an immersive one, where participants wear special glasses and a data glove.

Details

Information Technology & People, vol. 30 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0959-3845

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 25 May 2012

Ling Peng, Geng Cui and Chunyu Li

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of innovativeness, change seeking and cognitive effort on consumer responses to traditional versus virtual testing…

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of innovativeness, change seeking and cognitive effort on consumer responses to traditional versus virtual testing environment.

Design/methodology/approach

The empirical study collects concept evaluations of five heterogeneous consumer appliances, from 400 members of an online panel. Generalizability theory (hereafter G theory) is used to assess the psychometric quality of the evaluation data in different testing environments.

Findings

The results show that subjects with high innovativeness and change seeking report significantly more favorable concept evaluations and generate better quality data. However, the effect of innovativeness on testing outcomes and data quality would be reduced in virtual testing environment.

Practical implications

The results indicate that using firm or industry norms to interpret the testing outcome will be biased unless it accounts for whether the screening processes result in equally innovative or variety seeking samples of respondents.

Originality/value

Managerially, the current results indicate that a product manager wanting to concept test a pool of appliance concepts can benefit from screening for the respondents, who will provide higher quality concept testing data in a traditional testing environment. However, the effects of traits on data quality are mitigated in a virtual testing environment. The findings provide a surprising insight that subject selection is not a more critical issue in virtual testing.

Details

Journal of Product & Brand Management, vol. 21 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1061-0421

Keywords

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