VR in Education: An Introduction to Multisensory Constructivist Learning Environments Daniel Fällman, Department of Informatics, Umeå University Anders Backman, HPC2N/Centrum för Utbildningsteknik Kenneth Holmlund, Centrum för Utbildningsteknik Abstract: For educational purposes, Virtual Reality (VR) has been proposed as a techno- logical breakthrough that holds the power to facilitate learning. Though, most efforts within the VR community have focused on applications designed to ful- fill purposes of training, such as vehicle simulators, medical and military train- ing. While this area is not at all unimportant on university level, we believe it is also adequate to explore how this style of interaction could be used to help stu- dents develop understanding and more proper mental models of complex sys- tems and processes, abstract models and other non-intuitive material. The hy- pothesis is that VR can successfully be used to support such complex under- standing by stimulating and exploring all human senses whereas traditional no- tions of learning tend to focus on purely intellectual skills. We examine the constructivist philosophy of learning and discuss how it may be supported by the use of VR, and we provide examples of different classes of VR applications that for educational purposes focus on learning. The main objective of this paper is to introduce the survey in progress and outline some of the initial findings of what has been done and what is currently being done in this field. Introduction The purpose of this paper is to outline educational uses of Virtual Reality (VR); primarily those that focus on higher education and are concerned with issues of learning and understanding as seen separated from training and simulation. The presentation and this paper’s main objective is to introduce the survey in progress and outline some of the initial findings of what has been done and what is currently being done in this field. As a starting point, we are primarily interested in exploring the ways in which VR may be used as a means of en- hancing, motivating and stimulating students’ understanding of certain events, especially those for which the traditional notion of instructional learning have proven inappropriate or difficult. We believe that VR holds the potential to have serious impact on education, since it supports a number of important con- cepts that might make a difference to education as we know it during the next decade. What is Virtual Reality?