Knowledge Bricks—Educational immersive reality environment

The purpose of this paper is to describe our newest achievement – the scientific concept of a novel Virtual Reality Educational System and its implementation – the Knowledge Bricks application. The synthesis of various scientific methodologies and technical approaches that we use led to this unique and novel and fully practical solution. In our opinion one of the most valuable elements of Knowledge Bricks is the application of the Gesture Description Language technology as a natural user interface and easy to manage gestures knowledge base usable for teachers when they are designing virtual worlds or visual information management application. The task-based architecture of the virtual world enables a clear definition of the interaction goal. What is more, our implementation based on off-the-shelf hardware has proven that deploying such an application in schools does not require expensive hardware or dedicated classrooms. We evaluated our approach on a group of students of different ages, particularly of the pre-school and primary school age for whom we believe our proposition will be the most valuable and attractive. Based on this system evaluation we can conclude that our natural user interface can be successfully used for all the considered age groups. We believe that 6–9-year-olds are the best target group for our system.