Immersion and Intersectionality - Virtual Reality in Cross Cultural Art Exhibition Courses

With Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies are becoming a trend in digital innovation in education due to their great strategic potential and are of great importance for many studies and programs. As a result, VR has become an indispensable tool in various fields such as science, geography, art and culture. VR creates a unique cross-cultural environment that enables deeper learning, stimulates interest and offers a very high educational potential. Today, new curatorial approaches are emerging alongside digitally activated modes of presentation and dissemination, characterized by permanent reproducibility and the sinking of physical space. Digitalization and global sharing of educational resources has been a hot topic of concern for arts management teaching. Cross-cultural courses on art exhibitions using virtual reality technology enable the integration of teaching resources from different cultural backgrounds and language environments. Virtual simulation technology is truly applied to a wider range of exhibition planning and research, bringing more resources and practical opportunities for teaching and industry. Practical art curation training has limitations such as high teaching costs and high transportation risks. However, virtual art exhibition teaching can allow students from different cultural backgrounds and regions to break through the limitations of time and space and feel the context and cultural connotation of the exhibition more intuitively, which improves students’ cross-cultural thinking and discernment awareness and cross-cultural communication ability. In order to give students the opportunity to practice the tedious and highly specialized curatorial process visually. This study focuses on a virtual art exhibition experimental teaching system using VR as a carrier to provide students with opportunities to cognize theory and practice and to build a platform for effective practice. On the one hand, it improves students’ exhibition planning ability. On the other hand, it gradually forms an integrated platform to promote the continuous updating of cross-cultural teaching of art exhibitions. Through the system to accurately restore the exhibition space of domestic and foreign art institutions, a large number of artwork resources. It enables students to easily feel the exotic spaces and precious artworks that are out of their reach on a daily basis, which greatly increases the importance and interest of online learning during the epidemic. In the course of teaching virtual art exhibitions, students can further experience and understand spatial planning, artwork display, and other curatorial expertise while focusing on conceptual expression and spatial presentation. Methods: This experiment adopts a quantitative research method, taking students of a school in China as the research object, randomly selecting 30 students (15 male and 15 female) as the control group and 30 students (15 male and 15 female) as the experimental group, the basic background of the two groups is similar, and all of them have initially studied the art exhibition course and have preliminary knowledge of the exhibition. The control group adopts the traditional teaching mode, with the teacher teaching knowledge and operation demonstration, while the experimental group adopts virtual reality technology for teaching. A pre-test was given to the two groups of students before the teaching activity to ensure that there was no significant difference in the prior knowledge of the two groups. After the teaching, a post-test was conducted and a questionnaire survey on learning interest and learning confidence was organized. By This study can be found by comparing the test scores, teaching questionnaire results and teaching satisfaction questionnaire between the control group and the experimental group. Students in the experimental group had higher average test scores than those in the control group, and students in the experimental group had higher classroom concentration, learning initiative, and satisfaction with classroom teaching than students in the control group. Students in the control group indicated that the knowledge in the classroom was too boring and they did not pay attention in class, while students in the experimental group indicated that the classroom participation was high, the classroom was more interesting, and they hoped that more experimental courses could be taught in this way. Through the study, it was learned that virtual art exhibition teaching can enhance students’ knowledge and classroom motivation about art exhibitions. Conclusions: This study found that the traditional art curation teaching course is not able to fully meet the students’ learning needs. Hands-on courses require more hands-on experience for students, and the use of virtual reality technology combined with traditional teaching can solve this problem well and improve students’ learning efficiency. The application of virtual reality technology in art exhibition course teaching focuses on building real cross-cultural contexts for students and conducting comprehensive practical training, thus improving the interactivity and efficiency of experimental teaching in cross-cultural courses. In addition, there are some noteworthy issues that need to be noted, whether the novelty of virtual reality technology will affect the actual operation and how to solve this problem remains to be examined.