Towards a New Chemistry Learning Platform with Virtual Reality and Haptics

With COVID-19, colleges had to change the way they handle education. Students had to adapt to remote learning instead of the face-to-face learning they are used to. The transition to remote learning has proved to be difficult, but most courses have translated over without any problems. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the lab courses, which traditionally have students conduct handson experiments. In order to achieve the same level of effectiveness that the labs had prior to COVID-19; a new system is required. The long-term goal of this work is to develop a complete immersive Virtual Reality (VR) chemistry lab. In the VR lab space, the student can handle chemicals and equipment to simulate an actual chemistry lab. Using a VR headset and haptic gloves, the user will be able to freely move and interact with the virtual lab, fellow students, and their teacher. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, instead of the students testing the virtual experience, we presented a 6-min video demonstration of our immersive VR chemistry lab to 109 General Chemistry students. Students filled out pre- and post-questionnaires. 80% of the students either strongly agreed or agreed with the statement, "I think learning general chemistry with VR and haptics will be more engaging than a standard lecture". For the statement, "I think undergoing the chemistry lab training in a VR environment rather than watching videos will help me learn the basics of chemistry lab better", 71.8% of the students strongly agreed or agreed with the statement.