Effects of Head-mounted Display on Reading a Drawing: A Case Study of Orthographic Projection

Hsi-Hsun Yang and Jia-Hao Chen
National Yunlin University of Science and Technology
Yunlin, Taiwan

Although orthographic projection is a fundamental and most important module in a graphics course, 23% of surveyed students expressed frustration at learning orthographic projection. This study made use of a head-mounted virtual reality (VR) display to develop a set of virtual teaching materials that observed three-dimensional objects from different angles in VR, thereby helping learners to switch between two-dimensional and three-dimensional graphs to improve their ability to read orthographic projections. The experiments in this study were based on a single-subject A-B-M reversal design, divided into three phases: a baseline phase (A), an intervention phase (B), and a maintenance phase (M). The head-mounted display was adopted to investigate the changes in the students’ ability to read a drawing with regard to orthographic projections. Two design school students who had completed a graphics course and had low spatial abilities were enrolled as the research subjects. The experiments entailed 16 learning sessions that spanned eight weeks. The results demonstrated that the correct answers given by Student 1 (S1) increased after entering the intervention phase — a difference which was shown by C-statistic analysis to be statistically significant. The experimental outcomes of Student 2 (S2) failed to reach a statistically significant level. However, she believed that continuous VR training would increase her learning efficacy because it helped her to give correct answers to questions that she did not even understand during the pre-test.