New Perspectives for Engineering Education – About the Potential of Mixed Reality for Learning and Teaching Processes

The majority of mixed reality scenarios have been mainly the subject of game engines. ‘Mixed Reality’ describes the combination of virtual environments and natural user interfaces. Here, the user’s field of view is controlled by his natural head movements via a head mounted display. Data gloves e.g. allow direct interaction with virtual objects and omnidirectional treadmills enable unrestricted navigation through a virtual environment by natural walking movements. To evaluate perspectives and potential for the use of mixed reality settings within engineering education an experimental study has been carried out, focusing on the impact of spatial presence and flow on cognitive processes. To assess the effects of natural user interfaces on cognitive processes, a two-group-plan (treatment and control group) was established. The mixed reality simulator was used as main stimulus of the treatment group whereas the control group used a laptop as interaction device. The learning environment was kept constant over both groups. The data were collected and interpreted with quantitative methods. Constraints of data collection exist since the influence of the hardware can only be evaluated within a set of independent variables, which consists of a combination of different user interfaces to a mixed reality simulator. Thereby not all of the disruptive factors could be eliminated. In this paper the study and the detailed results are described, which showed advantages especially regarding affective and motivational factors of virtual environments for cognitive processes. In particular, the depth of the resulting spatial presence and the phenomenon of flow are discussed. The paper closes with a discussion of the question, to what extend such innovative technologies establish new possibilities for educational sciences and pedagogics, especially focusing on engineering education and the field of virtual experiments.