Watt: Imersão 3D Compartilhada e Acessível na Realidade Virtual do Surgimento da Revolução Industrial

Resumo

Virtual Reality (VR) educational environments can be creative, intelligent and dynamic teaching aids, with broad pedagogical potential. The present work assumes that is possible to provide shared, interactive and immersive VR solutions with low cost but with quality. This work also assumes that VR can introduce the student into a fictional but realistic world, very appropriate for teaching History. This possibility is tested by WATT, a 3D virtual world, aimed at teaching the historical processes that occurred during Industrial Revolution. WATT is an interactive, animated and intelligent virtual world, containing intelligent characters, technological artifacts and locations existing at the beginning of the revolution. Gamification and intelligent agent technology are used to engage and help students. WATT was positively evaluated through laboratory experiments and by external experiments carried out with simulated classes.