Investigating the effect of virtual reality application on teaching assistance for machine tools operation education

With the assistance of developed virtual CNC machine tools, industry and school can alleviate the educating and training constraints on CNC practice courses. However, whether the design product (virtual machine tool) is consistent with student´s expectation is also worthwhile to study. Therefore, in this paper, we investigated the effect of VR on the student´s intention to learn the designed VR machine tool in CNC practice course based on affordance theory. The proposed theoretical model was empirically evaluated by using survey data collected from 170 students concerning their perceptions of affordance for a designed VR machine tool. The research result might provide a reference for academy and industry to design an improved VR system to satisfy student´s expectation.