Applying NuPOV to support students’ three-dimensional visualization skills

Abstract In chemistry education, the visualization of three-dimensional elements has always played an important role. However, it is challenging to teach such concepts because most of them are being done on two-dimensional media. With the recent prevalent rise of virtual reality and augmented reality (VR/AR) technologies in higher education, there have been many attempts at using these technologies to present the concept to students. However, those attempts have their limitations, and our AR project, “Nucleophile’s Point of View” (NuPOV), aims to address those limitations. By using NuPOV, users could not only view chemistry concepts from the AR interface, but they can also interact with them. These methods enable users to have an individualized and self-directed experience, which enable them to have a better understanding of the concepts. Our study has shown that such an approach proved to be relatively well received by students.