An experiment on students taking a history course, ‘The Roman Civilization’ showed statistically significant differences in favour of students who used a VR app both in motivation and in academic performance [1]. Earth Art Offline is a Virtual Reality app that extends the idea of this research to humanities education.

The current version of the app covers proof of concept features for two subjects, Geography and History. The core features are described below:

1. Location Guesser - The VR user is shown famous locations in the world, she can then move through the location to interact with the artefacts present and get information about them. User will then guess the location by adding a pin to a globe visible on the scene. In the current version, user is taken to one such location, Stonehenge.
2. Blast to the Past - The VR user is shown a location of historical significance. She can interact with the objects in the scene to understand the historical events and then guess the year in which the even occurred. In the current version, user is taken to Normandy beach and scene depicts the situation during World War II.

Besides the geographical similarity of the locations, the scenes contains real world artefacts, interactive experiences to increase student's knowledge, interesting animations and audio walkthroughs. The game starts with the user in a spaceship which first takes her to the geographical use case followed by the historical tour.

References:
[1] Rafael Villena Taranilla, Ramón Cózar-Gutiérrez, José Antonio González-Calero & Isabel López Cirugeda (2019) Strolling through a city of the Roman Empire: an analysis of the potential of virtual reality to teach history in Primary Education, Interactive Learning Environments, DOI: 10.1080/10494820.2019.1674886