Transforming education with augmented reality, metaverse and virtual reality technologies in the 21st century

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the articles published on augmented reality (AR), metaverse, and virtual reality (VR) in the 21st century based on the Web of Science (WoS) database. In this study, we evaluated 2203 scientific documents in the education category. We examined the data set obtained from the WoS database within scientific productivity, network analysis, trend topic, thematic change, conceptual structure, and thematic map. We analyzed the distribution of articles by year and number of citations, core authors, most cited articles, productive institutions, dominant authors by years, and productive countries within scientific productivity. The network analysis determined cooperation between authors, institutions, and countries, keyword cloud, and co-occurrence networks according to keywords. In the last stage of the research, we examined trend topics, thematic change, conceptual structure, and the formation of thematic maps. The research analyzed scientific documents with 71,050 reference information, representing 87 countries and published by 5781 authors. According to the findings, the number of articles and citations published on AR, metaverse and VR has increased significantly, especially in the last ten years. Hwang, G. J., Makransky, G., and Tsai, C. C. stand out as core authors. Prolific institutions include the National Taiwan Normal University and the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. China, USA, Spain, Türkiye, and United Kingdom are among the leading producing countries. While emphasizing the technological infrastructure as thematic change, the best size reduction representing the conceptual structure accounts for approximately 58% of the total variability. We shared some thoughts on the future of AR, metaverse, and VR as suggestions