Investigating Immersive Virtual Reality as an Educational Tool for Quantum Computing
Alexander Zable, Lloyd C. L. Hollenberg, Eduardo Velloso, Jorge Gonçalves
Abstract
Quantum computing (QC) is an intrinsically complex yet exciting discipline with increasing practical relevance. A deep understanding of QC requires the integration of knowledge across numerous technical fields, such as physics, computing and mathematics. This work aims to investigate how immersive Virtual Reality (VR) compares to a desktop environment (‘web-applet’) as an educational tool to help teach individuals QC fundamentals. We developed two interactive learning tutorials, one utilising the ‘Bloch sphere’ visualisation to represent a single-qubit system, and the other exploring multi-qubit systems through the lens of ‘quantum entanglement’. We evaluate the effectiveness of each medium to teach QC fundamentals in a user study with 24 participants. We find that the Bloch sphere visualisation was well-suited to VR over a desktop environment. Our results also indicate that mathematics literacy is an important factor in facilitating greater learning with this effect being notably more pronounced when using VR. However, VR did not significantly improve learning in a multi-qubit context. Our work provides valuable insights which contribute to the emerging field of Quantum HCI (QHCI) and VR for education.