Workshop: Mapping the Landscape of Virtual Reality in Distance Education

The workshop (Organized by: Commission on User Experience, Commission on Cartography in Early Warning and Crisis Management, Commission on Cognitive Issues in Geographic Information Visualization), held as part of the 10th ICC GIS (June 2026, Nessebar, Bulgaria), presented the potential of collaborative immersive virtual reality as a tool for mapping (not only) social interactions and a sense of belonging. Virtual reality, together with concepts such as digital twins, offers synthetic environments that enable a wide range of activities and can be tailored to different types of tasks.

While virtual environments have certain limitations compared to the real world, they offer one important advantage: participants’ actions and behaviours can be continuously recorded and evaluated. The resulting data and analyses can be used in a variety of contexts, including learning analytics, with particular attention to the role of audio communication and spatially anchored collaboration, as well as the prediction of task success in real time while an activity is still underway.

The workshop introduced the Terra Incognita scenario, an environment designed primarily for distance education, and presented an approach to logging and analysing participant data and using the results for various research and practical purposes.