Exploring the effect of virtual reality with haptics on educational research: A meta-analysis from 2010 to 2020

Virtual reality (VR) not only expands the learning field and enriches the learning experience, but also provides an effective presentation for scarce educational resources. However, because VR mainly depends on image processing technology, its application in the field of education mostly stays at the level of knowledge observation, and many challenges are gradually exposed, such as untimely interaction and weak sense of existence. In recent years, haptics has gradually become the development frontier of human-computer interaction, breaking through the limitation of single visual stimulation of VR to a great extent. Some researchers began to explore the teaching mode of VR with haptics, in order to mobilize learners’ multi-sensory stimulus responses such as hearing, touch, force and movement, and enhance learners’ on-the-spot experience and flow experience. In order to deeply explore the effectiveness of VR with haptics in teaching and explore the regulatory variables affecting this teaching method, 1646 academic papers published from 2010 to 2020 were screened based on WOS and Scopus databases. After meta-analysis of 50 selected research data, it is found that: (1) from the perspective of overall effect, VR with haptics can significantly improve learners’ learning performance and efficiency; (2) Through the analysis of the effects of three regulatory variables, it is found that VR with touch has a positive impact on learning performance; VR with haptics has a positive impact on learning efficiency, especially for learners who have no previous learning experience and take practical skills as their learning goal for a long time. This discovery provides an important data reference for building an effective “virtual reality with haptics” teaching scene. Copyright © 2022 Immersive Learning Research Network.