Virtual and Augmented Reality for Edutainment

Dear Colleagues,

Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are increasingly being recognized for their educational potential, and are seen as an effective way to convey new knowledge to people. These technologies allow the development of compelling teaching and training environments, where learners can analyze problems and explore new concepts. Users can be immersed into interactive scenarios where the core concepts can be made explicit. These environments also offer the potentiality to involve students and trainees in collaborative activities, which encourage discussion and reflection about the learning material.

The term edutainment refers to the integration of education and entertainment, and edutainment software is usually developed in the form of computer games, or serious games, which have found applications in several areas, from education to training, exercise and rehabilitation in medicine, cultural heritage, and so on. Nowadays, this domain can benefit from a new generation of high-quality consumer-level products, which expand the possibilities for instructors, designers and developers to create novel, compelling and engaging edutainment environments. However, these new opportunities requires as well addressing several theoretical and practical aspects. Among them, which design frameworks are most suited to maximize the learning impact? Which tools are most effective to improve the users’ feeling of immersion? How to foster collaboration? To which extent are edutainment applications effective with respect to their expected outcome?

This Special Issue focuses on the opportunities, impact and challenges provided by VR/AR technologies for edutainments. We encourage authors to submit their original research articles dedicated to explore the relationship between edutainment, serious games and VR/AR technologies. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Virtual environments for edutainment
• Augmented Reality for edutainment
• Design frameworks for VR/AR serious games
• Human Computer Interaction
• User/Player experience in edutainment
• Collaborative learning environments in VR/AR
• Distributed environments
• Interactive digital storytelling
• Virtual actors in edutainment
• User-related studies

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Informatics is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.