VIRTUAL REALITY IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION RESEARCH: A CASE ON AMAZON SUMERIAN

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) has gained increasing academic attention in recent years, and a possible reason for that might be its spread-out applications across different sectors of life. From the advent of the WebVR 1.0 API (application program interface), released in 2016, it has become easier for developers, without extensive knowledge of programming and modeling of 3D objects, to build and host applications that can be accessed anywhere by a minimum setup of devices. The development of WebVR, now continued as WebXR, is, therefore, especially relevant for research on education and teaching since experiments in VR had required not only expertise in the computer science domain but were also dependent on state-of-the-art hardware, which could have been limiting aspects to researchers and teachers. This paper presents the result of a project conducted at CITEC (Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology), Bielefeld University, Germany, which intended to teach English for a specific purpose in a VR environment using Amazon Sumerian, a web-based service. Contributions and limitations of this project are also discussed.