Research on VR/AR integration in education

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are taking off in almost every part of our living. Lately VR/AR technologies are increasingly present in education as well. Virtual experiences offer a great opportunity to involve and motivate students to learn through experience. Accordingly, the data and the research topics and publications exploring VR/AR implementation in the field of education are also evolving rapidly. To investigate the research papers and trends, in this study we used the metadata from IEEE database for the research publications in this field starting from 1990 till 2021. The study presents our major findings regarding the research on application of virtual and augmentative reality technologies in education. It includes several quantitative as well as qualitative results from the analysis of the data gathered from over 700 publications. The research showed that the main increase in the research publications that study the use of AR/VR in education is in the last decade which corresponds with the release of the first headsets. Also, AR research papers are entering the scene later but show a more continuous trend till the present time. In addition to this, in terms of authors of the papers and their countries, it was found that the more developed countries lead the game with a larger number of authors while the non-developed countries remain with no authors of AR/VR publications.