Perspectives on Virtual Reality in Higher Education for Robotics and Related Engineering Disciplines

Industrial engineering education has a strong focus on and affinity towards technology. While Virtual Reality hardware and applications advance and learning behaviour changes, it is particularly interesting to determine the possible use of Virtual Reality for teaching engineering subjects, for example fundamentals of robotics. This paper presents a study which examines the possible use of Virtual Reality learning environments at higher learning institutions. The study shows perspectives of students and lecturers and identifies opportunities and challenges for the use of Virtual Reality in industrial engineering education. The results of the indicated study show that the participants have a positive attitude towards Virtual Reality and strong motivation for in class use. The study results also suggest, that Virtual Reality content creation should be included in engineering curricula.