The Potential of 360° Virtual Reality Videos and Real VR for Education - A Literature Review

Virtual reality (VR) has a wide variety of potentials for education. Especially 360° videos can provide immersive educational experiences of otherwise not accessible real-world environments. But what potential do 360°videos in VR and real VR settings have for teaching? Research into the use of real VR, providing live-learning experience in the classroom is still scarce, which is why this article investigates this issue in the context of a systematic review. We discuss use cases, advantages, and limitations as well as interaction characteristics of the potential of 360°videos, and also the promises of real VR scenarios. By analyzing 64 articles in-depth, our results suggest that 360°videos can be used for a wide variety of topics. While only a few articles report technological benefits, there are indicators that 360° videos can benefit learning processes in terms of performance, motivation, and knowledge retention. Most papers report positive effects on other human factors such as presence, perception, engagement, emotions, and empathy. Furthermore, an open research gap has been identified in use cases for real VR.