Extended Reality in Built Environment Education
Abstract
Extended Reality (XR) technologies, including Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR), have become increasingly prevalent across all education stages. Beyond the known learner engagement benefits of XR-enabled immersive and interactive learning experiences, XR technologies offer specific pedagogical advantages in built environment (BE) education, where the ability to create, manipulate, navigate, and communicate spatial design are core skills. However, despite evidence of pedagogical effectiveness, XR technology integration within BE education remains limited, ad hoc, and weakly theoretically grounded. To understand the barriers to integrating XR technology in BE education, this research followed the PRISMA protocol to systematically identify, screen, assess, and synthesize relevant literature related to applications of XR in BE education that reported learning outcomes and challenges. Our findings indicate that XR-integrated learning can enhance learner engagement while also positively influencing BE-specific learning outcomes, such as students’ spatial cognition, including perception of scale and volume. Significantly, the literature analysis also underscores how time associated with the technical setup, training, and implementation of XR-integrated learning activities, and the effort required to maintain virtual environments and models shifts educators’ focus from pedagogy to technology management and contributes to the weak integration of XR into curricula. Based on these insights, a pedagogical framework comprised of five core dimensions is proposed to guide the planning, implementation, and iterative refinement of XR integration in BE design curricula. By aligning pedagogical context, learning design, technology configuration, enabling conditions, and evaluation practices, educators can work from a more robust pedagogical foundation to realize the benefits and evaluate the outcomes of XR integration. In addition to this practical contribution, examining the distinctive pedagogical setting and demands of BE education also contributes a valuable disciplinary perspective often overlooked in the broader discourse on XR-integration in higher education.