VRtoolsEd2017: Workshop on VRtools for Education/Training SHENZHEN, China, September 11-13, 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 workshop aims to 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.  

Submission Guidelines

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. Papers must be written in English and must not exceed 6 pages. Authors should submit papers via the easychair workshop submission website in PDF format,  complying with the ACM conference proceedings style.  Submitted papers must not have been submitted for review or published (partially or completely) elsewhere. Every paper will be peer-reviewed by at  least three reviewers. Papers will be assessed based on originality, correctness, relevance, and quality of writing. The submission Web page for VRtoolsEd2017 is:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=vrtoolsed2017. 

The accepted papers will aim to be short approx. 4000 words  in length complying with the ACM conference proceedings style  and act as the anchors to set the background to a discussion panel entitled “The future of Virtual Reality Simulations in Education”.  The discussion panel will be opened by a keynote speaker from the industry sector.

List of Topics

• VR technology for education/training
• Methodologies for VR development in education/training
• Applications/Case studies of VR in education/training
• HCI with VR tools for education/training
• Evaluation techniques for VR tools for education/training
• Vision for futuristic VR tools in education/training

Committees

Program Committee

• TBA

Organizing committee

• Assoc. Prof. Eleni Mangina, University College Dublin, Ireland
• Assis. Prof. Abey Campbell, University College Dublin, Ireland

Invited Speakers

TBA

Publication

All presented papers in the conference will be published in the proceedings of the conference and submitted to ACM Digital Library. Proceedings are submitted for inclusion to the leading indexing services: EI, ISI Thomson's Scientific and Technical Proceedings at Web of Science, Scopus, CrossRef, Google Scholar, DBLP, MAS, EBSCO, as well as EAI's own EU Digital Library (EUDL).

Venue

TBA at SHENZHEN, PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA (http://simutools.org/2017/show/travel-info)

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to abey.campbell@ucd.ie  & eleni.mangina@ucd.ie