Vr-GIS and Ar-GIS In Education: A Case Study Ilario Gabriele Gerloni, Vincenza Carchiolo, Alessandro Longheu, Ugo Becciani, Eva Sciacca, Fabio Vitello Abstract—ICT tools and platforms endorse more and more educational process. Many models and techniques for people to be educated and trained about specific topics and skills do exist, as classroom lectures with textbooks, computers, handheld devices and others. The choice to what extent ICT is applied within learning contexts is related to personal access to technologies as well as to the infrastructure surrounding environment. Among recent techniques, the adoption of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) provides significant impulse in fully engaging users senses. In this paper, an application of AR/VR within Geographic Information Systems (GIS) context is presented. It aims to provide immersive environment experiences for educational and training purposes (e.g. for civil protection personnel), useful especially for situations where real scenarios are not easily accessible by humans. First acknowledgments are promising for building an effective tool that helps civil protection personnel training with risk reduction. Keywords—Education, virtual reality, augmented reality, civil protection. I. I NTRODUCTION T HE role of ICT within education and training almost spans everyday’s activity, both in educational institutions as well as in working contexts. ICT not only include a set of tools and good practices to improve learning environments, but they also endorse educational institutions in keeping their syllabuses up to date with advances and changes in on-the-edge topics; this includes elective courses [1] as well as the so-called MOOC [2]. There is a lot of models and techniques for people to be educated and trained about specific topics and skills [3]- [5]. These include classroom lectures with textbooks, computers, handheld devices and others. The choice to what extent ICT is applied within learning contexts is related to personal access to technologies as well as to the infrastructure surrounding environment; moreover, educational contents can be accessed via a variety of media, ranging from non-interactive books to highly interactive digital experiences that fully engage the users senses. In this sense, the mantra for bringing intelligent devices into learning scenarios has changed over the years from ”a computer on every desktop” to a ”computer/tablet on every lap” and finally to a ”device in every hand” [6], a.k.a. ”Bring your own device” or BYOD [7]. Personal devices have indeed several unique features [8] as portability, social interactivity, context sensitivity, connectivity Ilario Gabriele Gerloni is with the Dip. Ingegneria Elettrica Elettronica e Informatica, Universit´ a di Catania, Viale Andrea Doria 6, 95125 Catania, Italy. Vincenza Carchiolo and Alessandro Longheu are with the Dip. Ingegneria Elettrica Elettronica e Informatica, Universit´ a di Catania, Viale Andrea Doria 6, 95125 Catania, Italy (e-mail: vincenza.carchiolo@dieei.unict.it, alessandro.longheu@dieei.unict.it). Ugo Becciani, Eva Sciacca and Fabio Vitello are with the Astrophysical Observatory of Catania, Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), Italy (e-mail: ugo.becciani@inaf.it, eva.sciacca@inaf.it, fabio.vitello@inaf.it). and individuality that endorse a plethora1 of unique modes of interacting, such as distributed, collaborative investigations, peer-to-peer networking or joining physical and virtual space in instruction. The last frontier though is going to be crossed: virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) devices, platforms and applications [9]. Apart gaming and simulations context, the role of AR/VR is becoming more and more central, indeed an international survey of practices improvements in teaching shown that it comes from intensive use of videos in teacher education [10]; moving from simple to immersive video experiences via AR/VR is one step away. AR/VR are educational mediums increasingly accessible to young users. The use of these technologies looks very promising in many fields of education, particularly in those areas where field experimentation is very important but at the same time difficult to implement. These technologies are generally mixed with other emerging concepts as social networks (i.e., Twitter, Instagram, Facebook), the Internet of Things (IoT) and wireless sensor networks (WSN) or Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Our attention concerns the use of GIS combined with Virtual and Augmented Reality (in the following we name this combination AR-GIS and VR-GIS). Due to their novelty, not much consideration has been given to the performance enhancement that would result through their use in education. These work aims for the benefit of these tecniques. In this work we introduce a case study where AR/VR is exploited for GIS scenarios in an educational context (e.g. personnel training). In particular, in Section II a brief related work about the use of VR-GIS and AR-GIS in Education is introduced. Sections III and IV illustrate the case study and some implementation issues. Finally concluding remarks are pointed out in Section V. II. VR-GIS AND AR-GIS IN EDUCATION Virtual Reality is the name for a set of experiences that share the simulation of visual sensation thanks to the use of computer generated images, which make the user feel as he is in a real world built of computer graphic objects - in this case the environment will be called ’immersive’ - or in an environment not similar to a corresponding one in phisical reality. VR-GIS technology is a combination of virtual reality (VR) and GIS technologies. The major manufacturers [11] of hardware providing VR experiences are Google (Daydream View VR, Cardboard), Valve and HTC (Vive), Samsung (Oculus Rift) and Sony (PS VR). These consist, with minor design variations, in a occluding headset visor that leads the user to an immersive experience and in two wireless console controller. World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology International Journal of Educational and Pedagogical Sciences Vol:13, No:6, 2019 895 International Scholarly and Scientific Research & Innovation 13(6) 2019 ISNI:0000000091950263 Open Science Index, Educational and Pedagogical Sciences Vol:13, No:6, 2019 waset.org/Publication/10010506