Contemporary Developments in Mixed, Augmented, and Virtual Reality: Implications for Teaching and Learning

Dear Colleagues,

By their very nature, virtual environments and immersive worlds suggest affordances for learning that educators are particularly suited to speak towards, not least due to the potential for dynamic, embodied, and multisensory learning experiences to sit alongside field studies in the physical world. Such environments and their associated technologies are not new, having been marketed to consumers since at least the mid-2000s—and earlier if panoramic photographs are included.

Virtual environments are, however, enjoying a recent resurgence of interest, not only because of the recent pandemic but because of the introduction of the mixed reality headset from Apple in February 2024. In its marketing rhetoric, the company has appropriated the term ‘spatial computing’ from a seminal work by Shekhar et al. The latter define the term as referring to “the ideas, solutions, tools, technologies, and systems that transform our lives by creating a new understanding of locations–how we know, communicate, and visualize our relationship to locations and how we navigate through them”.

‘Spatial computing’ technologies therefore foreground the role of the body in meaning-making and creative expression. By allowing learners to engage with digital content overlaid on their physical surroundings, these devices facilitate an embodied, multisensory approach to learning that bridges the physical and psychological dimensions. Learners can leverage natural interactions and familiar environmental cues to construct personally relevant understandings, moving fluidly between consuming and producing knowledge artifacts in a shared hybrid space.

In this Special Issue, we seek academic and critical perspectives on the potential impact of such socio-technological developments on teaching and learning.

Therefore, we call for contributions that report studies on mixed, augmented, and virtual reality teaching/learning scenarios. This Special Issue helps to focus research on the utility of such learning environments. It also provides an opportunity to highlight what we already know in this field, which areas in the research landscape appear ripe for exploration at present, and what future developments can be expected.

Topics that would be of relevance to this Special Issue include, but are not limited to: 

• Constructivist perspectives on the design of learning environments which leverage the affordances of mixed, augmented, and virtual reality;
• Early initiatives in mixed, augmented, and virtual reality as a means of affording canvases of expression for learners;
• Critical analyses of curriculum design paradigms which seek/have sought to incorporate mixed, augmented, and virtual reality; 
• Perspectives on scaling learning interventions with mixed, augmented, and virtual reality; 
• Open source data and the evolution of mixed, augmented, and virtual reality for learning.

You may choose our Joint Special Issue in Applied Sciences.

Dr. Kenneth Y T Lim
Dr. Michael Vallance
Guest Editors

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 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

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-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Virtual Worlds 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 1200 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.