Virtual forest: design and evaluation of a walk-through system for forest education

Forest education is generally conducted in a real forest to provide learners a direct experience with reality. However, often it is not easy to participate in forest education programs carried out in remote places due to distance, limited time, or economic or physical restrictions. Therefore, we developed a walk-through system for forest education in a virtual forest and evaluated its educational efficacy as well as usability through indoor experiments. The virtual forest was constructed with omnidirectional images taken in a forest using a digital camera with an omnidirectional vision sensor. The results of the postquestionnaire showed that the developed system was highly evaluated by the participants in the experiments in terms of educational efficacy and enjoyment. Also, comparison of results of prequestionnaire and postquestionnaire showed that it had educational value. On the other hand, some technical problems in the developed system were revealed. For example, 45.0% of the participants answered that the walk-through in the virtual forest did not proceed with sufficient smoothness, and encountered unexpected slowdowns and stops. In addition, image quality was not high enough to identify small objects in the virtual forest. Regardless of these problems, we believe that the computer-based forest education was successful because 88.3% of the participants answered that they would like to join a similar program again and 90.0% answered that they would like to visit the real forest that the virtual forest imitated.