An Innovative Study on the Integration of Cross-Cultural Virtual Reality Technology in Art Practice Courses

Objectives: With the development of the times, the group of students who love art and participate in art practice activities is getting bigger and bigger, and the related courses in colleges and universities are getting more attention and financial investment. The traditional teaching of practical art courses requires students to have a certain knowledge base of the course, and then to operate it through practical tools to a venue with relevant conditions. Based on this, the art practice course need to take more manpower, material and time. In addition, considering the different cultural backgrounds of students, coupled with uncontrollable factors such as weather conditions, venue arrangements, and virus transmission, this also has a worse impact on the actual teaching. This study applies virtual reality technology to the art practice course, carries out virtual simulation experimental teaching, crosses the limitation of time and space, creates realistic learning situations for students, and achieves a high degree of integration of “virtual environment+real operation”, so as to improve the teaching effect of the art practice course. The development of art practice courses is an important process of combining theory and practice, but in the traditional teaching process there is a problem of “emphasizing theory but not understanding”. The teachers’ teaching method is single and ignores the importance of comprehension learning. In addition, the arrangement of the course takes a lot of teachers’ efforts and the executability of the teaching is greatly reduced. Besides, in the context of globalization, intercultural design practice courses have come into the public eye, but the actual teaching effect is not good due to the problems of cultural span and the difference of understanding. How teachers can create the right context to make the transmission of intercultural design knowledge more profound and the teaching process more interesting and intuitive is an urgent problem to be solved. The virtual reality technology with three characteristics of immersion, interaction and imagination has basically solved the existing problems of teaching art practice courses. It uses 3D graphics generation technology and multi-sensing interaction technology to generate 3D realistic virtual environments. Students enter the simulated virtual environment through the unique interactive equipment, and can feel the real teaching situation as well as the artistic atmosphere. In this way, not only does it improve the feasibility of teaching and the cultural inclusiveness of the course, but it also improves the fun and interactive nature of the course. Methods: The subjects of this study were selected from two classes of second-year art departments of a Chinese university, from which 30 students were randomly selected each, one group as the control group (15 male and 15 female students) and the other group as the experimental group (15 male and 15 female students). The students in both groups had the same curriculum-related education content, the same level, and had a preliminary understanding of the art practice curriculum. For the students in the control group, the traditional teaching method is adopted. The teacher teaches the knowledge in the classroom, and then goes to the designated place for practical operation; for the students in the experimental group, the teaching method of combining virtual reality technology with the curriculum is adopted, and the teacher completes the construction of the virtual practice scene through VR technology, and teaches the art practice in the virtual environment while explaining the knowledge. Before teaching, pre-test questionnaires of students’ knowledge will be conducted to ensure that there are no major differences in the prior knowledge of the experimental subjects; after the teaching, relevant questionnaires will be conducted according to the students’ learning situation and classroom effect. Finally, the questionnaire data were analyzed and the experimental results were recorded. Results: The comparison of the experimental results shows that: in terms of questionnaire score, the average performance of the experimental group is significantly higher than that of the control group; in terms of teaching effect and feedback, students in the experimental group are significantly more interested and enthusiastic in learning, more satisfied, and hold more positive evaluation of the teaching method; In terms of cultural differences, students in the experimental group had a good acceptance and enjoyment of the course. In contrast, students in the control group all clearly indicated that the course content was boring and less attractive. Conclusions: This study found that the introduction of virtual reality technology into art practice courses can improve students’ motivation and largely solve the problem of traditional teaching methods being boring. The use of “virtual technology+reality teaching” can allow more students from different cultural backgrounds to enjoy the convenience of teaching and truly participate in the virtual environment, reducing the inevitable alienation problem of cross-cultural design teaching and enabling students to have a deeper and more comprehensive absorption and mastery of art practice knowledge. In addition, because virtual reality technology has not yet reached the level of popular application, its technology is still being updated and iterated, and it is still to be examined in terms of stability and operability. Therefore, the actual teaching application needs to be more rigorous and serious dialectical treatment.