Enhancing cross-cultural educational awareness: Experimental study on immersive experiences using virtual reality

The current cross-cultural education still faces problems such as low awareness and ability in cross-cultural education, low cultural sensitivity, shallow awareness of cross-cultural differences and poor cross-cultural ability to cooperate with others. The significance of this study lies in enhancing awareness and abilities in cross-cultural education to improve the current state of cross-cultural education and promote cross-cultural communication and understanding. The paper used Unity to build a virtual scene, and then selected 120 college students as research subjects and divided them into three classes: virtual reality immersive experience group (Class 1); traditional learning group (Class 2); and flipped classroom group (Class 3). A comparative experiment was designed. The research results found that the average scores of cultural differences and cultural conflict sensitivity among students in Class 1 reached 89.33 and 91.54, respectively. The average scores of cultural differences and cultural conflict sensitivity among students in Class 2 were 73.68 and 76.26, respectively. The average scores of cultural differences and cultural conflict sensitivity among students in Class 3 were 78.05 and 77.00, respectively. In addition, the cognitive depth and adaptability to cross-cultural cooperation of Class 1 students who use immersive virtual reality experiences are significantly better than those of the other two classes. The research results indicate that using immersive virtual reality experiences for cross-cultural education can help improve students' awareness and ability in cross-cultural education, increase their cultural sensitivity, enhance their cognitive level of cultural differences and enhance their cross-cultural cooperation ability.