Page 157 - Kaleidoscope Academic Conference Proceedings 2020

IMMERSIVE TECHNOLOGIES FOR DEVELOPMENT: AN ANALYSIS OF
AGRICULTURE

Omowunmi Isafiade¹; Ofentse Mabiletsa¹

¹Department of Computer Science, University of the Western Cape, South Africa

ABSTRACT immersive technologies in agriculture [7]. Researchers and
developers’ efforts should be informed by the current trend
Agricultural development is key to any economic of development in the agriculture sector and an ever-
development. Immersive technology plays a catalytic role increasing need to support and expand the sector. Hence, we
and offers smart and sustainable choices to farmers who consider using systematic mapping to identify elements of
want to improve on agricultural productivity, and to existing research that are dedicated to the application of
agricultural training institutes that seek to use modern immersive technologies in agriculture to highlight potential
technology to advance pedagogy and reduce fatalities and gaps for future research direction. The identified gaps point
operating costs in the learning space, among others. toward unexplored regions of immersive technologies design
Currently, there are limited descriptive literature reviews in for agriculture, which could motivate future work in this
the area of immersive technology in agriculture, hereafter domain of interest. In what follows, this work presents an
referred to as AVR-Agric. This paper presents a systematic overview of immersive technology, and evaluates the
literature review (SLR), which offers a structured, following:
methodical, and rigorous approach to the understanding of
the trend of research in AVR-Agric, and the least and most a. How are immersive technologies embedded in
researched issues. This study explores and examines the agriculture? What design elements, learning
current trends in the immersive technology-based contents, and immersive technologies have been
agriculture areas, and provides a credible intellectual guide laid out to support agricultural practices?
for future research direction. The SLR was limited to existing b. What integrative technologies and agricultural
applications and peer-reviewed conference and journal theories or principles have been applied to guide
articles published from 2006 to 2020. The results showed VR application design and development for
that virtual reality was implemented in 41% of the papers agricultural advancement?
reviewed, augmented reality was found in 53%, while only c. What evaluation methods have been employed to
6% considered mixed-reality applications. The study also assess the development of immersive technology-
showed that developments that incorporate IoT, blockchain, based agriculture content?
and machine-learning technologies are still at their stage of
exploration and advancement. The remaining part of the paper is organized as follows:
Section 2 presents an overview of immersive technologies
Keywords – 4IR, Agric 4.0, AVR-Agric, immersive and a systematic literature review. Section 3 looks in depth
technology into AR and VR research in agriculture, analyzing existing
solutions on offer by other providers. Section 4 highlights
1. INTRODUCTION current trends in the core areas of immersive technology.
Section 5 concludes the paper and makes future
The agriculture sector is a key player in every economy recommendations.
through job creation and food production [1], [2], amongst
others. Immersive technologies play a key role in the 2. LITERATURE REVIEW
development and support of agricultural practices and farm
offerings [4]. These technologies have become mission 2.1 Overview of Immersive Technologies
critical to several farm operations and have been key to the
development of modern online learning platforms and Immersive technologies are technologies that extend reality
agricultural developments [5], [6]. However, little scholarly or create a new reality by leveraging 360 environments and
and systematic work currently exists on how researchers offer the ability to naturally interact with the outside world
have applied the technologies for agricultural purposes that The technologies span: (i) augmented reality (AR) [8]; (ii)
considers the usage of both high-end and budget head- virtual reality (VR) [9]; (iii) mixed reality (MR) [10]; and (iv)
mounted displays (HMDs), among others. Currently, what extended reality (XR). These technologies are at the
exists are limited descriptive literature reviews in the area of forefront of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR), changing

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