VREX: Virtual reality education eXpansion could help to improve the class experience (VREX Platform and Community for VR based Education)

This paper proposed an innovative education platform-VREX (Virtual Reality based Education eXpansion), with combination of online and offline, to improve the curriculum building and teaching experience. VREX is based on Virtual Reality (VR) and we believe VR can revolutionize the education ecosystem. With some trials, we found VR can be used to promote curriculum effectiveness in an immersive environment so that students can have intuitive sense to understand some abstract knowledge, which is always hard for teachers to describe. We have tried to transfer slides into VR scenes, for the students to learn knowledge in a rather real but totally virtual world. The main contributions were made: (1) VREX build an open and immersion virtual O2O classroom with internet and VR devices so that real classrooms might be used in a different way in the future. (2) VREX provides a distributed mode for students to experience an interactive learning process at anytime, anywhere and any-frequency. (3) VREX can be used to support education in different disciplines, from K-12 to Universities, and we provided some practical cases, like 'Marine Life' to show creatures in deep sea, which provides immersive experience to makes students feel they were there. Finally, the feasibility and advantage of VREX are proved by the actual statistical data in the 3^rd season 2017.