Design of 3D Virtual Reality in the Metaverse for Environmental Conservation Education Based on Cognitive Theory

Background: Climate change causes devastating impacts with extreme weather conditions, such as flooding, polar ice caps melting, sea level rise, and droughts. Environmental conservation education is an important and ongoing project nowadays for all governments in the world. In this paper, a novel 3D virtual reality architecture in the metaverse (VRAM) is proposed to foster water resources education using modern information technology. Methods: A quasi-experimental study was performed to observe a comparison between learning involving VRAM and learning without VRAM. The 3D VRAM multimedia content comes from a picture book for learning environmental conservation concepts, based on the cognitive theory of multimedia learning to enhance human cognition. Learners wear VRAM helmets to run VRAM Android apps by entering the immersive environment for playing and/or interacting with 3D VRAM multimedia content in the metaverse. They shake their head to move the interaction sign to initiate interactive actions, such as replaying, going to consecutive video clips, displaying text annotations, and replying to questions when learning soil-and-water conservation course materials. Interactive portfolios of triggering actions are transferred to the cloud computing database immediately by the app. Results: Experimental results showed that participants who received instruction involving VRAM had significant improvement in their flow experience, learning motivation, learning interaction, self-efficacy, and presence in learning environmental conservation concepts. Conclusions: The novel VRAM is highly suitable for multimedia educational systems. Moreover, learners’ interactive VRAM portfolios can be analyzed by big-data analytics to understand behaviors for using VRAM in the future to improve the quality of environmental conservation education.