Phase World of water: A case study of a virtual reality world developed to investigate the relative efficiency and efficacy of a bird's eye view exploration and a head -up -display exploration

Virtual reality is an emerging technology in educational applications. Although designers will borrow from established disciplines, such as computer-aided design and multimedia, VR has its unique features and attributes that must be studied and understood.;"Phase World" was a unique VR program designed and implemented for this study. A phase diagram is usually a 2-D graph that shows the relationships between two of temperature, pressure and specific volume variables in the solid, liquid and gaseous states. In "Phase World", use was made of virtual reality's ability to reify abstractions. The actual quantitative database for the phases of H2O was transformed into a 3-D graph in virtual reality. The result was a visualization of a huge database.;The second new VR feature used in "Phase World" was the implementation of different points of view. The first version facilitated a global view, referred to as the "the bird's eye view" or BEV. In this version, the subject had the freedom to either fly at unlimited altitudes for an overall view or to navigate along the surface. The second version limited the subject to navigation along the surface, but provided a head-up-display map for the overall view, referred to as the HUD version. The study investigated the relative efficiency and efficacy of these two points of view as subjects journeyed through "Phase World" and identified eight different phase regions and phase combinations.;The results were that the BEV version was more efficient, but the relative efficacy findings were inconclusive. The findings also suggested that the subjects that were helped most had low 2D visualization and low 3D spatial orientation skills. An unexpected relationship surfaced between a feeling of presence and 3D visualization. The subjects with the lowest scores on 3D visualization had the highest feeling of presence. This finding requires further study.;Virtual reality is a medium that could add a new tool to enhance student learning. Research is essential to determine VR's niche in education, design principles for efficiency and efficacy, and learner characteristics to benefit.