Sustainable Development of Diversified Teaching Mode from Ecological Perspective: A Case Study on Metaverse-Based Landscape Oil Painting Course

Recently, oil painting teaching, especially landscape oil painting teaching, has developed rapidly in universities. The cultural and artistic atmosphere of oil painting is powerful, which positively improves students’ aesthetic capability and can also play a specific role in cultivating students’ sentiments. More and more frequent emergence of diversified teaching modes positively impacts oil painting teaching in universities [25]. Although many measures have been adopted in oil painting teaching in some universities, many problems have some adverse effects on the development of diversified teaching modes in universities, mainly including the following aspects. (i) The cultural education of students needs to be taken more seriously. In landscape oil painting teaching, some teachers pay too much attention to cultivating students ‘professional skills, which leads to the relatively weak cognition of some students’ basic knowledge of oil painting and hinders the development of students’ creative thinking ability. (ii) Some teachers need to understand innovative landscape oil painting courses, such as the metaverse-based landscape oil painting courses proposed in this study.

The gradually expanding environmental problems have already extended from the external environmental crisis to the depths of people’s hearts. How to effectively suppress the ecological imbalance in all aspects of nature, society, and spirit, improve the living environment and lifestyle of human beings, and reconstruct the value of existence and the meaning of life are all ecological issues that human beings must seriously consider [26]. In changing teaching methods and improving diversified teaching, the first thing to emphasize is ecology. The increasingly harsh environment guides the development of diversified landscape oil painting courses. The ecological imbalance is created into a picture world via the landscape oil painting teaching, which is the desperate cry of human society’s development. It sounds the alarm for those people who are still unaware of the ecological dilemma in the joy and awakens the concept of building environmental protection. From the ecological perspective, landscape oil painting teaching has promoted the popularization of ecological concepts with its rich and vivid content, meticulous and unique depiction, and the transmission of deep ecological connotations. As an essential carrier of art, painting has the characteristics of traveling through time and space and can realize the most expansive sharing and communication. Therefore, the natural, social and spiritual ecological crisis presented in the landscape oil painting teaching from the perspective of ecology enables students to resonate in their hearts, thereby enhancing human’s concept of environmental protection and ultimately promoting the harmony between man, nature, and social development.

The existing teaching methods have needed to be revised to meet the actual needs of the current landscape oil painting teaching in universities. Under such circumstances, universities should change the current teaching mode and seek innovation in landscape oil painting teaching [27]. To assist students and enable them to discover the wonderful things around them, teachers should coordinate their efforts with the actual situation. Additionally, in terms of teaching methods, we should try our best to make the class not monotonous and boring but more active to stimulate students’ interest in learning oil painting. Landscape oil painting works generally express the inner thoughts of the creators, and the works are usually integrated with the creators’ views and ideas, as well as their innovative thinking. Through the works, we can see the students’ pursuit and yearning for a better life. Under the diversified teaching mode, students’ innovation ability will be significantly improved. Universities must abandon rigid and outdated teaching concepts. Only in this way can the diversified teaching mode play a role.

The oil painting has been developed since the 14th century. As one of the essential painting carriers, oil painting is presented to everyone visually. It is in the hands of generation after generation of artists constantly innovating and exuding dazzling brilliance. Today’s society is diversified, so artistic creation also presents diversity. Landscape oil painting, on the one hand, can reflect the attractiveness of today’s society. On the other hand, it shows different creation methods due to the integration of various elements, which makes oil painting more prosperous and more wonderful.

The commercialization trend in the consumer age is a problem all art types face. Works of art are facing new changes in production, consumption, communication, and transaction modes and are developing from traditional production and consumption modes to digital and multimedia [28]. Oil painting is also facing the problems of pure art creation, mass oil painting consumption, and the impact brought by digitalization. It should include the market development of the landscape oil painting industry, the development of landscape oil painting talent, and the landscape oil painting communication platform and technique. The benign inheritance and sustainable development of landscape oil painting should be realized from both internal and external aspects.

Students should be given opportunities and platforms to show their talents as much as possible. For example, the government or universities can hold national and provincial landscape oil painting competitions, and the judges can invite some art scholars who are reasonably accomplished in oil painting creation. In this way, more talented young painters in oil painting can be tapped to help them improve their artistic creation ability and further promote the development of landscape oil painting.

Landscape oil painting is a cultural and creative industry. Therefore, according to the current development of landscape oil painting, it is necessary to rationally deal with the relationship between artistry and commercialization from the perspective of cultural and creative art industries to promote breakthroughs in landscape oil painting. The 21st century’s social economy has grown quickly, and we have entered the fast-moving consumer goods market [29]. The public is more willing to regard works of art as a feast of entertainment rather than a feast of art. However, it should be emphasized that the primary and most basic mission of oil painters is innovation and creation. Oil paintings can be commercialized, but creative concepts and behaviors must stay within artistry and be replaced by commercialization. By rationally dealing with the relationship between artistry and commercialization and taking this as a breakthrough, we can better create landscape oil paintings with artistic and commercial value.

In response to the demand for talents in landscape oil painting, universities should comprehensively consider the positioning and the current reality when designing curriculums. A teaching system that satisfies professional standards, adheres to the demands of the discipline’s dynamic development, and is capable of reflecting student characteristics and the benefits of the discipline should be developed based on a combination of social demands for the growth of the oil painting business. To improve students’ comprehendsive abilities, it is also required to modify adjust the teaching material in accordance with the demands of relevant industries and introduce new teaching modes. Additionally, universities must enhance the practicality and expansibility of curriculum content and develop students’ subject skills. Teachers must inspire and guide students to explore so that students can create artworks that meet people’s aesthetic requirements in exploration and learning activities.

To sum up, landscape oil painting, or the oil painting industry, as a new type of cultural, entrepreneurial industry, is not only a key development content in modern art but also a hopeful way to improve the level of artistic creation. From the perspective of long-term development, only from the central idea expressed by oil paintings, conduct a comprehensive and objective analysis of its current living conditions, and actively explore and find new sustainable development paths to solve the unavoidable bottleneck in the development to ensure the long-term and stable development of landscape oil painting.

Metaverse is a visual immersion technology with great potential, and the application of metaverse in education will be a subversive educational revolution. Metaverse can effectively avoid silence in class and the limitation of classroom time and space [30]. The essential thing in the metaverse-based landscape oil painting courses is ensuring an immersive experience effect. When the teacher plays the landscape sampling video, it is necessary for the students to feel the landscape from multiple angles. The premise of drawing is to feel, and the metaverse increases immersion for students while feeling. Students can only go to the designated location to create specific landscape oil paintings due to time and space restrictions. The strong sense of the experience of the metaverse ensures the feasibility of painting in the classroom. Texture synthesis is the core method of the video content production process under VR technology.

In the production of VR landscape sampling content, a group of cameras or a camera device including multiple cameras and sensors and audio sensors are used to collect sound-visual scenes in the real world. Devices such as cameras and sensors output digital video and audio signals [31]. Generally, cameras can capture the content of the surrounding 360-degree directions. For VR video processing, the VR video images at the same time are stitched, projected, and mapped. The texture synthesis of projected image frames generates an encapsulated frame. For a three-dimensional plane or curved surface, after setting parameters such as the position and direction of the viewpoint, the line-of-sight direction, and the position of the projection plane, the projection transformation matrix is represented by a triangular mesh, which can be used to deduce the three-dimensional coordinates of the grid in the three-dimensional plane or curved surface in reverse. After the triangular mesh on the two-dimensional plane is determined by projection, a continuous scaling field is assigned to it. That is, a scaling factor is assigned to each triangle patch to ensure that the scaling factor between adjacent triangle patches has continuous variability. Let S_i represent the distance from each triangle patch in the 3D landscape to the viewpoint, and all S_i can be integrated into a threshold value of a discrete function S(i). The viewing distance S_i and S_i+1 between any adjacent triangle patch i and i+1 are determined, and the difference φ_i between them can be expressed below.

Then, the upper limit value max φ of φ_i can be obtained by Equation (1).

Let the length factor of the reduction degree of the interactive input sample image be minScale. When the minScale is 0.4, it means that the size of the sample changes gradually in [0.4,1]. Based on minScale, pyramid reduction is carried out for a given texture sample image to obtain a multi-level scaled sample image. These scaled sample images are the basis for obtaining corresponding sample images by scaling factor in the scaling field in texture synthesis.

The primary function of the surface texture vector field is to control the basic direction of the texture on the surface. Let A = {a₁, b₁, c₁} and B = {a₂, b₂, c₂} represent two vectors, respectively, and θ represents the angle between vector A and vector B, then

With any axis as the center, a triangle patch is rotated at a certain angle, and the size and shape of the triangle patch do not change after rotation. Let AB denote any axis, (Xa, Ya, Za) and {a, b, c} denote the coordinates of point A and the direction vector of AB, respectively. Thus, a triangle patch rotated θ degrees around the axis AB corresponds to the three vertices of the triangle patch multiplied by the matrix W, as follows.

where T_A represents the translational coordinate system, and A represents the origin of the new coordinate system. W_x and W_y are the AB axis rotated by an appropriate angle around the X-axis and Y-axis of the new coordinate system. Then the AB axis coincides with the Z-axis of the new coordinate system. W_z rotates θ degrees around the AB axis, and W_x⁻¹, W_y⁻¹, T_A⁻¹ represent the inverse transformation, thereby restoring AB to its original position.

Rotate each triangle patch so that the Z-axis coordinates of its three vertices are the same. A(x₀, y₀, z₀), B(x₁, y₁, z₁), and C(x₂, y₂, z₂) represent the three vertex coordinates of the triangle patch ABC respectively, and n={a, b, c} represents the normal vector of the triangle patch.

Rotate points B and C around point A and the vector parallel to XOZ-plane, so that the normal vector of the triangle patch is parallel to XOZ-plane. Rotate points B and C around point A and the vector parallel to the Y-axis, so that the normal vector of the triangle patch is parallel to the positive direction of the Z-axis. After each triangle patch on the curved surface is rotated, each normal vector is parallel to the Z-axis. The rotated triangle patch can be understood as being on the same plane, simplifying the vector field calculation process. Set the mean value of n vectors to be consistent with the sum of these n vectors, and perform unitization processing on n vectors.

The search-match process is to extract the matching area in the texture grid [32]. According to the texture direction vector of the current triangle patch to be textured, search in the reverse order of the scan lines in the sample texture, and determine the texture coordinates with the highest similarity to the texture value of the matching area template, which is used as the texture coordinate value of the current triangle patch to be textured. At the bottom of the texture space, the adjacent triangles are rotated in the same direction to obtain the matching template. The scan-line method searches the sample texture space according to the corresponding step size. The texture coordinates with the highest consistency with the textured triangle are obtained.

To verify the practical application effect of VR landscape sampling content texture synthesis, a simulation analysis was carried out. The simulation used a self-built texture sample dataset and selected water ripple and grass texture samples in the texture sample dataset for texture synthesis, as shown in Fig. 1. As seen from Fig. 1, using the proposed method to synthesize large-area similar textures can truly achieve no texture deformation, and solve the issues of boundary discontinuity and periodicity of synthesized textures in texture synthesis. At the same time, using the proposed method for texture synthesis can also achieve a high perspective effect, which is of great help to VR landscape oil painting courses and increases the immersion of students watching VR landscape videos.

Fig. 1. Texture synthesis effect.

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This study uses Laplacian image-based geometry texture synthesis [33] and optimized texture-by-numbers synthesis method [34] as baselines for comparison. The spatio-temporal performance of the suggested method and the baselines are compared using the synthesis of grass texture samples as an example, and the results are presented in Tables 1 and 2. Table 1 shows that, in terms of synthesis time, the suggested technique outperforms the baselines due to the real-time synthesis of the proposed method in the process of landscape rendering without complex preprocessing for texture samples, improving the efficiency of texture synthesis. Table 2 shows that the proposed method requires less storage space for texture synthesis, and the storage space is reduced by more than 50% compared with the baselines. The proposed method performs well in synthesis time and file size after synthesis, which undoubtedly improves the students’ experience watching VR landscape videos.

To analyze the teaching effect of the diversified teaching mode of the ecological perspective, and then study the application value and influence of metaverse-based landscape oil painting course, evaluate the application effect, and put forward corresponding suggestions to serve the landscape oil painting teaching better. In this study, two classes of fine arts major in the School of Fine Arts of Xinxiang University are selected as experimental objects. One class is the experimental group, and the other is the control group, with 25 students in each of the two classes. This study tested the application effect of metaverse-based landscape oil painting courses in the form of questionnaires. The Likert scale was used for survey research, with 1−5 representing strongly disagree, disagree, neither agree nor disagree, agree, and strongly agree [35]. The questionnaire is investigated from seven dimensions, namely perceived usefulness (PU), perceived ease of use (PEU), perceived immersion (PIM), behavioral intention (BI), learning interest (LI), perceived of wearing (PW), perceived of communication (PC), each dimension contains one or two items, as shown in Table 3. The items in the scale refer to mature scales with high reliability and validity in related research, refer to many papers, and combine the application effects of metaverse-based landscape oil painting courses with being tested for specific designs. Statistical analysis was carried out on the returned questionnaires through SPSS23.0, and the results are shown in Table 4.

The analysis of the statistical data can be summarized as the following results.

The two classes selected for this study did not perform significantly differently from one another. Next, an independent sample student’s t-test was used to determine whether there was a significant difference in student performance between the experimental and control groups after using the metaverse-based landscape oil painting teaching method [36]. Among them, the control group used the previous teaching method, while the experimental group used the metaverse-based one. Table 5 shows that the average score of the experimental group is 83.7200, the average score of the control group is 75.200, the standard deviation of the experimental group is 8.49274, and the standard deviation of the control group is 10.23474. The standard deviation is small, indicating that the degree of dispersion of scores is small, and the scores are relatively concentrated; the degree of dispersion of the scores of the students in the control group is relatively large, and the scores are relatively scattered.

The results of the independent sample t-test between the experimental and control group are shown in Table 6. As seen from Table 6, the Sig of Levene’s test [37] result of the equality of variances is more significant than 0.05, indicating that the variances of the two classes are equal, so the test results only need to focus on the line “Equal variance assumed.” The test results show that Sig is less than 0.01, indicating that the difference is significant, so it can be explained that there is a significant difference in the score of the experimental and control groups. While the average score of the experimental group is higher than the average score of the control group, indicating that metaverse-based landscape oil painting courses have a specific effect and are helping to improve students’ scores.

It can be seen from Fig. 2 that after the metaverse-based landscape oil painting courses, the scores of the students in the experimental group and the control group were significantly different in each grade. All the experimental group students’ scores were above 60 points, and the scores were concentrated between 80−89 points. There are seven students with a score above 90, and the number of students with low scores is small. The students’ average score is 8.52 points higher than that of control group. The control group’s students’ results were mostly between 70 and 79 points. The number of high-scoring students was small, and two students failed. Analyzing the number of students in each grade shows that metaverse-based landscape oil painting courses can improve students’ interest in learning and performance.

Fig. 2. Score statistics.

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Previous studies in art education have explored integrating technology, particularly VR, in teaching practices. These studies have consistently highlighted the positive impact of interactive and immersive learning environments on student engagement and learning outcomes. Our research aligns with these findings, as we observed a notable enhancement in students’ immersion and sense of presence when incorporating the metaverse and VR technology into the landscape oil painting course. These results further support the notion that technology can be a valuable tool in facilitating experiential and active learning in art education.

Furthermore, our investigation of texture processing in 360-degree VR landscape sampling videos and the development of a curved surface texture synthesis method is an area that has garnered attention in computer graphics and virtual reality research. While a limited number of studies explicitly focus on texture synthesis in the context of VR landscape videos, our approach aligns with the broader literature on texture synthesis techniques. The promising outcomes of our proposed method in enhancing the students’ viewing experience align with previous research that emphasizes the significance of high-quality and realistic textures in immersive environments.

Regarding incorporating ecological concepts in the landscape oil painting course, our study is part of a growing body of research exploring the intersection of art education and environmental awareness. Numerous studies have emphasized the potential of art to promote ecological consciousness and foster sustainable behaviors. Our findings support these existing studies by showcasing the effectiveness of integrating ecological themes and concepts into the curriculum. Using landscape oil paintings, which inherently convey ecological imbalances and concerns, we provide students with a medium to creatively express and explore environmental issues.