Usability and Engagement Study for a Serious Virtual Reality Game of Lunar Exploration Missions
1
School of Interactive Games and Media, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY 14623, USA
2
Army Research Laboratory, Huntsville, AL 35899, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Informatics 2019, 6(4), 44; https://doi.org/10.3390/informatics6040044
Received: 29 June 2019 / Revised: 27 September 2019 / Accepted: 29 September 2019 / Published: 3 October 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gamification and Advanced Technology to Enhance Motivation in Education)
Virtual reality (VR) technologies have opened new possibilities for creating engaging educational games. This paper presents a serious VR game that immerses players into the activities of lunar exploration missions in a virtual environment. We designed and implemented the VR game with the goal of increasing players’ interest in space science. The game motivates players to learn more about historical facts of space missions that astronauts performed on the Moon in the 1970s. We studied usability and engagement of the game through user experience in both VR and non-VR versions of the game. The experimental results show that the VR version improved their engagement and enhanced the interest of players in learning more about the events of lunar exploration.
Keywords:
serious game; usability; game engagement; virtual reality
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Cao, L.; Peng, C.; Hansberger, J.T. Usability and Engagement Study for a Serious Virtual Reality Game of Lunar Exploration Missions. Informatics 2019, 6, 44.
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