When High Fidelity Matters: AR and VR Improve the Learning of a 3D Object

Virtual and Augmented Reality Environments have long been seen as having strong potential for educational applications. However, research showing actual evidences of their benefits is sparse. Indeed, some recent studies point to unnoticeable benefits, or even a detrimental effect due to an increase of cognitive demand for the students when using these environments. In this work, we question if a clear benefit of AR and VR can be robustly measured for a specific education-related task: learning a 3D object. We ran a controlled study in which we compared three interaction techniques. Two techniques are VR- and AR-based; they offer a High Fidelity (HF) virtual reproduction of observing and manipulating physical objects. The third technique is based on a multi-touch tablet and was used as a baseline. We selected a task of 3D object learning as one potentially benefitting from the HF reproduction of object manipulation. The experiment results indicate that VR and AR HF techniques can have a substantial benefit for education as the object was recognized more than 27% faster when learnt using the HF techniques than when using the tablet.