Metaverse Sojourn: Incorporating Virtual Reality and Immersive Interactive Environment to Enhance Students’ Sojourn Experiences

The COVID-19 pandemic posed a huge challenge to university student exchange activities. Pandemic immigration policies of different regions and countries not only greatly reduced student traffics between universities of different countries. National quarantine policies of different countries also limited students’ opportunity to physically visit places relevant to their studies. In light of these challenges, a team was formed under the Hong Kong Baptist University’s Global and China Studies Program that has developed a virtual teaching and learning project, “Metaverse Sojourn”, to experiment and provide Hong Kong university students to have virtual tours in China and Europe by using latest metaverse technology. This chapter will share the conceptual and pedagogical designs of the project, as well as the technical and pedagogical difficulties encountered during implementation of the project. Difficulties notwithstanding, we argue that the idea of “metaverse sojourn” not only can give students a brand-new augmented reality exchange experience, but also has great potential in developing interactive teaching and service-learning activities among students, teachers and service recipients on metaverse platform.