Immersive Technologies for Development: An Analysis of Agriculture

Agricultural development is key to any economic development. Immersive technology plays a catalytic role and offers smart and sustainable choices to farmers who want to improve on agricultural productivity, and to agricultural training institutes that seek to use modern technology to advance pedagogy and reduce fatalities and operating costs in the learning space, among others. Currently, there are limited descriptive literature reviews in the area of immersive technology in agriculture, hereafter referred to as AVR-Agric. This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR), which offers a structured, methodical, and rigorous approach to the understanding of the trend of research in AVR-Agric, and the least and most researched issues. This study explores and examines the current trends in the immersive technology-based agriculture areas, and provides a credible intellectual guide for future research direction. The SLR was limited to existing applications and peer-reviewed conference and journal articles published from 2006 to 2020. The results showed that virtual reality was implemented in 41% of the papers reviewed, augmented reality was found in 53%, while only 6% considered mixed-reality applications. The study also showed that developments that incorporate IoT, blockchain, and machine-learning technologies are still at their stage of exploration and advancement.