Auratic Response to a Virtual Church and Corresponding Physical Church

There are empirical studies on both the cognitive and performative outcomes of learning via VR and the affective aspects of the use of VR in learning. Studies on affective outcomes in relation to the learning object, such as the attitude towards it or the atmospheric effect of a visited environment on the students, are still pending. This desideratum of educational research is addressed in this paper by comparing the auratic experience elicited by physical church visits with that elicited by virtual church visits via Head Monted Displays (HDMs). Therefore, the study applied an experimental design with two points of measurement and two treatments. Auratic experience was operationalized as both mystical experience and flow, while flow was structured according to the two dimensions of control and concentration. The participants were students of religious education (N = 52). In both virtual and physical exploration, there is hardly any mystical experience to be measured. However, it is the physical visit that stimulates a more pronounced experience than the virtual visit. However, the auratic experience in the given experiment is sensitive to the time of measurement: switching from virtual to physical exploration seems to stimulate an increase in the mystical experience, while switching from physical to virtual exploration somehow attenuates this experience. This result and the limitations of the study are discussed.