ABSTRACT

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, millions of people had to stay at home for several months and to move their everyday activities online. From smart-working to online learning, also considering entertainment activities, people started to extensively use platforms for remote communication and for sharing video, text, and audio content. Such systems are able to cope with the need of communicating, but the common feeling is that people, and especially students, are missing the physical relationships with classmates and colleagues. In this paper, we analyse two modalities that can be used to give an online University lecture, by focusing on the ‘sense of presence’, i.e. on the ability to produce into students the psychological sense of being in a classroom together with the teacher and their classmates. We consider a standard web-conferencing system, and a Virtual Reality social platform. We also take into account the ‘usability’ factors, to understand if extended reality systems could be, in a near future, a possible alternative to improve distance lectures and meetings.

摘要

由于 Covid-19 大流行，数百万人不得不呆在家里几个月，并将他们的日常活动转移到网上。从智能工作到在线学习，还考虑到娱乐活动，人们开始广泛使用平台进行远程通信和共享视频、文本和音频内容。这样的系统能够满足交流的需要，但普遍的感觉是人们，尤其是学生，缺少与同学和同事的身体关系。在本文中，我们分析了两种可用于在线大学讲座的方式，重点是“存在感”，即让学生产生与老师一起在课堂上的心理感的能力，以及他们的同学。我们考虑一个标准的网络会议系统，和虚拟现实社交平台。我们还考虑了“可用性”因素，以了解扩展现实系统是否可以在不久的将来成为改善远程讲座和会议的可能替代方案。