Examining the impact of VR and MR on future teachers' creativity performance and influencing factors by scene expansion in instruction designs

Unlike the traditional environment, VR and MR environments provide novel, natural, lifelike 3D user interfaces, which can stimulate the imagination of users. Whether VR and MR environments can influence the creativity and its impact factors (flow, attention, and relaxation) of future teachers' scene expansion in instruction design are the focus of the study. Moreover, the differences between the impacts of VR and MR environments on creativity and its impact factors are also questions worth exploring. In this study, we developed VR and MR experiment environments as creativity support systems to stimulate future teachers’ creativity before they carry out the instruction design of experimental courses. The results show that the creativity, flow, and attention of future teachers which use the VR and MR environments were higher than in the traditional environment. Moreover, the future teachers' creativity of scene expansion in MR environment was higher than VR environment, the future teachers' attention of VR environment was higher than MR environment, and the future teachers.' relaxation of VR environment was lower than the traditional environment. These findings provide a useful inspiration, i.e. too high concentration or too high relaxation is not conducive to the production of creativity. The MR creativity support system that provides moderate and balanced attention and relaxation can good stimulate the creativity of future teachers in the instruction design. We expect these findings to inspire the design of creativity support systems and foster future teachers’ creativity level in instructional design.