Project Beyond: An Escape Room Game in Virtual Reality to Teach Building Energy Simulations

TL;DR

The paper introduces Project Beyond, a VR escape room designed to teach building energy simulations to civil engineering students. It combines educational content with puzzles, hints, and gadget-based feedback, underpinned by procedural onboarding and a surrogate energy model built from around 12,000 energy simulations. An expert evaluation shows the onboarding level delivers high usability with low workload, while the escape room provides engaging learning experiences despite higher cognitive and physical demands. The work demonstrates the potential of VR-based, gamified education for technical topics and points to future extensions, including cooperative play and broader applicability across domains.

Abstract

In recent years, Virtual Reality (VR) has found its way into different fields besides pure entertainment. One of the topics that can benefit from the immersive experience of VR is education. Furthermore, using game-based approaches in education can increase user motivation and engagement. Accordingly, in this paper, we designed and developed an immersive escape room game in VR to teach building energy simulation topics. In the game, players must solve puzzles like, for instance, assembling walls using different materials. We use a player guidance system that combines educational content, puzzles, and different types of hints to educate the players about parameters that influence energy efficiency, structural resistance, and costs. To improve user onboarding, we implemented a tutorial level to teach players general interactions and locomotion. To assess the user experience, we evaluate both the tutorial and the game with an expert study with gaming and VR experts (n=11). The participants were asked to play both the tutorial level and the escape room level and complete two sets of post-questionnaires, one after the tutorial and one after the puzzle level. The one after the tutorial level consisted of NASA-TLX and SUS questionnaires, while after the escape room level we asked users to complete the NASA-TLX, UESSF, and PXI questionnaires. The results indicate that the onboarding level successfully provided good usability while maintaining a low task load. On the other hand, the escape room level can provide an engaging, visually appealing, and usable learning environment by arousing players' curiosity through the gameplay. This environment can be extended in future development stages with different educational contents from various fields.

Figures (9)

• Figure 1: An overview of the escape room in Project Beyond.
• Figure 2: Top view of the onboarding level with hints to learn different interactions, e.g., golden footprints indicate smooth movement paths.
• Figure 3: The projector can be used to review the collected paper hints on a bigger scale.
• Figure 4: The building simulation desk showing the applied wall materials on the exterior walls of the simulation room.
• Figure 5: The simulation result gadgets (from left to right): mold, U-value, costs, structural stability, and energy efficiency.