Workshop on VRtools for Education/Training (VRtoolsEd 2017)

The synergy of education and technology can transform the world we live in. A virtual experience is usually achieved by feeding sensory information to a user via virtual displays (head mounted displays, 360 screen displays, etc.), and sounds. Along with this, it is also important for the user to provide an interaction to the virtual world. An important part of any virtual reality project is the level of detail and immersion that the user can experience. In previous generations of VR technology, the visual experience from the virtual world was limited due to hardware limitations and it was very difficult to simulate the world realistically. With the advances in computer graphics technology available today, we have access to technology that can easily simulate things in the real world. VRtoolsEd will complement the target of the SIMUtools conference by bringing together academic and industry researchers from the area of building simulation and virtual reality tools for educational purposes. Although education might have not changed over the years in terms of teaching approaches and techniques, todays’ millennial students have been using online learning and virtual reality is the next technology to be enabled and utilised worldwide. It has already been noted that:

• Collaboration in VR classrooms fosters social integration of learners;

• Virtual reality makes the impossible in reality possible, in terms of constructivism and game-based learning;

• Virtual game-based experience increases students’ motivation;

• Virtual reality introduces a new approach to rewards;

•  Virtual platforms and headsets are the new tools for inspiring creative learning.

Following the success of the workshop during SIMUtools 2015, VRtoolsEd will be running every two years to address the current and future trends in VR hardware, techniques and practices in different application domains (automotive industry, medicine, education etc.) with the aim to identify how new developments in VR over the last couple of years have allowed a rethink into what is possible to simulate in VR for Training, Education and Shared Collaborative Virtual Environments. We invite submissions that discuss the future of Virtual Reality in Education in terms of technical and practical issues within different domains that utilise Virtual Reality for education/training.