Progettazione, realizzazione e testing di un ambiente di realtà virtuale immersiva per l’apprendimento

This thesis presents the results of the research activities carried out during the PhD course in Philosophy, Epistemology and History of Culture at the University of Cagliari. The doctorate is part of the "Innovative Doctorates with industrial characterization" (PON-RI - XXXIII cycle), aimed at the promotion and strengthening of higher education in line with the needs of the national production system and with the National Strategy of Intelligent Specialization 2014-2020 approved by the European Commission. The research project mainly concerned the study of perception-action cycles in immersive virtual reality (VR) environments in order to understand how to better design virtual environments for learning and teaching, testing the collaboration between psychology, education and computer science. During the doctoral period, through the close collaboration between the research group of the Department of Pedagogy, Psychology and Philosophy of the University of Cagliari, the Lawrence Technological University of Detroit and the Software House "Infora", it was possible to design and develop a laboratory for immersive virtual reality called VirtuaLab (VLab), with the aim of analysing the impact on procedural learning of different combinations of structural and functional characteristics and implementable scenarios. The thesis is structured in three parts. The first part examines the theoretical aspects related to the use of virtual reality in areas ranging from learning to health professions, including entertainment and industrial training: the first chapter is dedicated to the definition of the concept of virtual reality and a detailed description of the different types of virtual reality available to the broad public. The following chapter contains a reasoned bibliographic review of the studies that have examined the different applications and objectives that virtual reality has encountered over time, regarding virtual environments dedicated to learning and professional training. The second part introduces the VirtuaLab software (VLab) which was developed for the thesis work and its main characteristics. The third part of the thesis presents two experiments carried out with the designed software: starting with the presentation of the first experiment carried out with a first version of the VLab software, Virtual Kitchen 1.0, focused on the analysis of the effects of different approaches in the presentation and execution of a procedure (implicit feedback VS explicit feedback), in order to evaluate its effectiveness in relation to procedural learning in immersive virtual reality environments. In the next chapter the main changes to which the VLab environment has been subjected are exposed thanks to the analysis carried out on the user experience of the subjects participating in the experiment with VK 1.0, and subsequently a second experiment is presented realized with the modified VLab software (Virtual Kitchen 2.0 or VK 2.0), aimed to verify the effects on performance and learning of two different tutorial modes (textual VS visual), to test the effect on the procedural learning in immersive VR environments. At the end of the thesis work, the results of the experiments are presented and possible future developments of the VirtuaLab software are discussed.