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Virtual Access to STEM Careers (VASC) is a technology-rich, inquiry and problem-based curriculum designed to expose and stimulate student interest in marine, environmental, computer, and geological sciences. Intended for 3rd through 5th grade students, VASC builds academic momentum at the intermediate level to prepare students for STEM opportunities later in middle school and high school. Our program is aligned with “Next Generation Science Standards” and “Common Core State Standards” and immerses students in rigorous, high-interest learning modules where students are introduced to and take on the roles of different STEM occupations. We are specifically developing and testing virtual reality-based modules that place students in a coastal environment where they learn about the sea turtle life-cycle. Students also practice the types of measurements and conservation tasks that park rangers and marine scientists regularly perform. The investigations focused on the design of a user interface that meets the needs of students and their teachers. We collected feedback on user interface design and knowledge gained by the users from the simulation. Additionally, we compared two different virtual reality head-mounted displays; i) HTC Vive and ii) Oculus Quest 2, to identify the pros and cons of each technology in future classroom settings. Our investigations yielded valuable information about how instructions should be presented to users, how the interface should provide immediate feedback for user error, how surveys should be administered, what equipment is most efficient for transporting and setting up large scale experiments in schools, and what types of interactions students and teachers want to experience in VASC. 

Visualizing data effectively is critical for the discovery process in the age of big data. We are exploring the use of immersive virtual reality platforms for scientific data visualization for COVID-19 pandemic. We are interested in finding ways to better understand, perceive and interact with multidimensional data in the field of cognition technology and human-computer interaction. Immersive visualization leads to a better understanding and perception of relationships in the data. This paper presents a data visualization tool for immersive data visualizations based on the Unity development platform. The data visualization tool is capable of visualizing the real-time COVID pandemic data for the fifty states in the USA. Immersion provides a better understanding of the data than traditional desktop visualization tools and leads to more human-centric situational awareness insights. This research effort aims to identify how graphical objects like charts and bar graphs depicted in Virtual Reality tools, developed in accordance with an analyst’s mental model can enhance an analyst’s situation awareness. Our results also suggest that users feel more satisfied when using immersive virtual reality data visualization tools and thus demonstrate the potential of immersive data analytics.