Virtual Reality in the Teaching of History of Architecture and Urbanism: A Literature Review

Abstract

Virtual reality has become popular recently, and many Colleges now have immersive labs. However, the application of this tool still needs to be widely consolidated, mainly in teaching theoretical subjects related to the field of design, such as the History of Architecture and Urbanism. In addition, only some publications still discuss the advantages of using VR on this theme. The objective of this research is to map the scientific articles published in the last 25 years related to the use of virtual reality in teaching the history of architecture and urbanism. The scientific research sites ScienceDirect.com, CuminCad.org and GoogleScholar.com were chosen to perform data collection. The keywords “history of architecture”, “virtual reality” and “learning” were used in the advanced search of each of the three sites mentioned. Subsequently, a two-stage filtering was carried out, the first related to reading the titles and the second aimed at reading the abstracts. Finally, the works found were all classified according to their own methodology, as well as their main contributions were identified. The main conclusion from this study is that, although VR is not yet consolidated in most architecture courses, especially in history teaching, the studies showed several benefits of applying the tool. However, the ways to do so still require further investigation, especially considering the emergence of new applications that are increasingly easy to use.