By pointing or using some other gesture, the user moves around the virtual world. But it can also function as a tool for picking things up, operating buttons, levers and equipment, or for just about any purpose imaginable. With VR, computer users can get directly involved with their task rather than worrying about the non-intuitive interface most of us still use. VR offers the same advantages to students. Virtual worlds built at George Mason University allow students to use their hands to directly manipulate source charges in electromagnetic fields, and atoms and bonds in organic molecules.
Students can become a ball and experience, first hand, Newton's laws of motion.
Children can use the Internet to log into the University of Illinois at Chicago's virtual garden , that they have to tend carefully in order top keep the plants alive. And back in Seattle, the Human Interface Technology Lab. has used a virtual world to help students understand what will happen in Seattle if global warming goes unchecked. This technology digitizes what someone is looking at, feeds it back immediately to the goggles they are wearing, and superimposes virtual objects onto the view of the real world. In this way, a dinosaur could walk into the classroom, or the characters in a book could come alive and act out the story you are reading. AR promises to be an excellent way to help students relate abstractions to real environments.