Education has long been touted as an appropriateapplication area for immersive virtual environments(VEs), but few immersive applications have actually beenused in the classroom, and even fewer have beencompared empirically with other teaching methods. Thispaper presents VENTS, a novel immersive VE applicationintended to teach the concept of the three-dimensional(3D) normalizing transformation in an undergraduatecomputer graphics class. VENTS was developed based onkey principles for the use of VEs in education,systematically evaluated for usability, and refined basedon the results of this evaluation. Students in a universitycourse used VENTS, and their learning was compared tothat of other students who either attended a lecture on thetopic or used a 3D desktop application covering the samematerial. The results of pre- and post-tests showed alarger percent increase in test score for the VE groupthan the desktop or lecture groups, although thesedifferences are not statistically significant.
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