Immersive intercultural experience for graphic communication studies through virtual reality

Abstract

At Taylor’s University, Intercultural Design is a project-based module where students are exposed to different cultures of foreign countries and are required to understand the role of design in a wide cultural, political and social context. Through this experience in addition to reflective practice, conceptualizing of ideas and active experimentations, the participating graphic communication students interpret their immersion of culture subjectively and present a piece that communicates the said cultural elements to intended audiences. The present COVID-19 international travel restrictions had disrupted this knowledge acquisition process and posed limits of onsite exploration, engagement with foreign agencies and face-to-face interactions with communities and cultures. However, previous studies had posited the potential of utilizing similar approaches via virtual space, place metaphors and avatar-environment interaction. Henceforth, this paper explored Virtual Reality (VR) technology that replicated environments of foreign destinations and allowed students to map information from this perspective in order to produce a graphic design-based output. This paper intended to further examine the effectiveness of VR by comparing information and feedback of; 1)participating students who had firsthand experience of foreign environment, and 2) students who only have second hand experience via VR. This paper also proposed the suitable selection of VR tools based on cost, accessibility, technological requirements and immersion satisfaction via online learning. The results achieved during the analysis is pertinent to endorse the intention towards the use of VR tools for online collaborative and student-centered learning experience for this module.