Science storytelling is an effective way to turn abstract scientific concepts into easy-to-understand narratives. Science storytelling in immersive virtual reality (VR) can further optimize learning by leveraging rich interactivity in a virtual environment and creating an engaging learning-by-doing experience. In the current context of the COVID-19 pandemic, we propose a solution to use interactive storytelling in immersive VR to promote science education for the general public on the topic of COVID-19 vaccination. The educational VR storytelling experience we have developed uses sci-fi storytelling, adventure and VR gameplay to illustrate how COVID-19 vaccines work. After playing the experience, users will understand how the immune system in the human body reacts to a COVID-19 vaccine so that it is prepared for a future infection from the real virus.

Prototype

Recommended citation: Zhang, L., Lu, F., Tahmid, I.A., Davari, S., Lisle, L., Gutkowski, N., Schlueter, L. and Bowman, D.A., 2021, March. Fantastic voyage 2021: Using interactive VR storytelling to explain targeted COVID-19 vaccine delivery to antigen-presenting cells. In 2021 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW) (pp. 695-696). IEEE.
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