Elsevier

Computers & Graphics

Volume 98, August 2021, Pages 280-292
Computers & Graphics

Technical Section
VRdeo: Creating engaging educational material for asynchronous student-teacher exchange using virtual reality

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cag.2021.06.009Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Novel concept of recording the tutor avatar as a third-person view of the narrator, which opens new possibilities for explanation of the narrative and its subsequent observation and exploration.

  • Customized camera adjustment when exporting the story as a standard 2D video for those who do not possess virtual reality devices. In this respect, we decoupled the story creation from the camera trajectory adjustments allowing for more flexibility in terms of post-processing.

  • Intuitiveness of the user environment with clear distinction between individual user roles in given stages of the content creation and exploration.

  • Possibility to interact with the objects and move them around in order to explore them in more detail, while the story playback is paused, and restoring the scene when the playback is resumed.

Abstract

Educational videos are traditional means of communicating scientific findings to a broader audience. Nowadays, they are also a very common medium in distant teaching. However, creating videos using the existing software tools can be very challenging for inexperienced users. Also, the student’s engagement in standard videos is often very limited as the experience and exploration of the presented phenomena is indirect and far from being interactive. To overcome this, we propose a novel tool, called VRdeo, for creating and presenting educational material that utilizes the advantages of virtual reality (VR). Each stage of the production is represented by an operating mode, where the user acts in a predefined role. VRdeo is a versatile platform that enables tutors to immerse into the virtual scene, explore 3D models of scientific data, and record a narrated story where the tutor is an active element, represented by a virtual avatar. The recording can be exported as a virtual scene. The observers (e.g., students) can then enter such a scene where they can move around and have several options for replaying and interacting with the tutor’s story. In cases when the observer cannot use a virtual reality device, VRdeo enables to generate a traditional 2D video as well. To evaluate VRdeo, we asked several experts in diverse fields for their feedback and conducted a user study with students, which gave us valuable information about its usefulness for both creating and consuming the narrated stories.

Introduction

Science communication forms an intrinsic part of research and education. Presenting the discoveries to students and the general public helps to inform about the research progress and its findings, but it also attracts the next generations to be more interested in science.

Within our long-term collaboration with experts in biochemistry and our numerous discussions, we revealed that they are very often facing problems with presenting their work to students as well as to a broader audience. Mostly, if they want to generate engaging educational material that goes behind simple slideshows of static images, they have two options. They can learn the basics of the existing software tools by themselves, which can be very time-consuming, or hire a scientific illustrator or animator, which is very expensive.

In this work, we propose the VRdeo tool, which is an alternative solution that operates with the engaging factor of the communication medium by utilizing the benefits of virtual reality, playing an increasingly important role in education [1]. Our tool specifically targets the asynchronous communication between the narrator of the story (teacher, researcher) and the observer (student, general audience). The process of creating educational material using our VRdeo tool and its resulting outputs can be seen in the supplementary video of this paper. The participants of our user study confirmed that using virtual reality for creating and presenting educational content substantially increases the engagement level, as the user is fully immersed in the environment and is not distracted by the external stimuli.

Although the idea of recording and replaying a narrative in VR is not novel, we see the contributions of our paper in the following:

  • Proposing an intuitive and easy-to-use virtual environment for generating and replaying educational material, with the option to export the content to the traditional 2D video.

  • Conceptualization of the user roles and operation modes, derived from the requirements of target users. This clear division of individual roles and modes enables to navigate the user through different stages of the creation process and support each of them with the necessary visual cues, interactions, and functions.

  • The option to prepare the scene for the export of the recorded story to the traditional 2D video. This is enabled by setting the camera trajectory and its parameters.

VRdeo was evaluated by several researchers from diverse fields who are regularly facing the challenge of creating educational material for their students or for presentation purposes. Additionally, we conducted the user study with students to verify the educational potential of VRdeo from their point of view as well. These studies and discussion of their outcomes are concluding the paper.

Section snippets

Related work

It is well known that static and dynamic visualizations are playing an important role in the learning process [2]. With the recent technological advances, digital storytelling became a powerful tool for teachers [3], [4]. Multiple studies, for example, in healthcare [5], medical education [6], [7], [8], biochemistry [9], warfare [10], statistics [11], or even cinematography [12], have demonstrated that animations and videos, in particular, are very efficient when it comes to education. It was

Initial requirements and task analysis

Within the numerous informal and later more structured discussions with our collaborators in biochemistry, we detected and iteratively refined the following set of specific requirements for an application that aims to support their needs when preparing educational and presentation material.

  • R1: The communication of the content should be asynchronous, not requiring the simultaneous presence of the tutor (story narrator) and students.

  • R2: The whole environment should be easy to control and

User roles

In accordance with task T1, we identified three main groups of users that need to be supported by our proposed tool. The first group consists of narrators (e.g., tutors) who are generating the content and capturing the virtual scene. The second group consists of observers who are consuming the final product (e.g., students). The third group consists of users who are preparing the export to 2D video for observers without access to virtual devices. We refer to them as camera operators. Although

User’s operation modes and interface

The required user’s actions fall into two categories: actions that are common for the whole tool, such as the movements within the scene or manipulation with objects, and actions specific for each of the user roles. To better distinguish between these role-based actions, we are proposing three operation modes that correspond to the individual user’s roles. The user switches between these modes using a hand menu (see Section 5.2) and the corresponding roles are set automatically.

VRdeo design and implementation

The main goal of this chapter is to provide the readers with a detailed description of the design of the proposed individual modes of VRdeo, along with their supported functionality and interaction options. The tool itself was implemented in the Unity game engine [37] which is currently one of the most widely used platforms for developing VR content. The application utilizes the OpenVR API to abstract from the specific VR hardware. The tool should work with most currently available headsets,

Case studies

The primary motivation for developing VRdeo was driven by our collaborating experts in biochemistry and medicine, but the tool can be used in diverse disciplines. Therefore, within the evaluation of the suitability of VRdeo and how it succeeded in meeting the user’s requirements, we conducted individual sessions with six experts from diverse research fields – biochemistry, medicine, geography, anthropology, psychology, and archaeology. In this section, we give a detailed description of two

User study

To test and assess the usefulness of VRdeo from the perspective of an observer, we additionally conducted the following user study. Here we formulated two hypotheses: (H.1) The VRdeo tool will be easy to use and more engaging for the users than standard 2D videos. (H.2) VR environment will have a positive effect on the learning process. To confirm or deny these hypotheses, we questioned 17 students from different study fields. Most of them were university students, but there was also one

General assessments and remarks

In this section, we summarize the interesting observations we made during the development and namely testing of VRdeo tool. Experiencing the narrated story in virtual reality was an undeniably different experience for the observers than watching a 2D video. The users who watched first the narrative in VR were then skipping through the 2D video, but none of the participants who first experienced the 2D video was skipping through the narrative in VR. The users were eager and motivated to explore

Conclusion and future work

In this paper, we introduced VRdeo, the tool for novel interactive representation and creation of educational material and narrated stories in virtual reality. The design of the functions of the tool is based on requirements gathered from our collaborators and their experience and problems with generating such material. Our proposed workflow is supported by three operating modes where the user is taking different roles. The user switches between these modes using the hand menu and the roles are

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financialinterestsor personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

References (60)

  • B.R. Stockwell et al.

    Blended learning improves science education

    Cell

    (2015)
  • C.Y. Wang et al.

    Again, together: Socially reliving virtual reality experiences when separated

    Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

    (2020)
  • K.-C. Shim et al.

    Application of virtual reality technology in biology education

    J Biol Educ

    (2003)
  • J.M. Clark et al.

    Dual coding theory and education

    Educ Psychol Rev

    (1991)
  • B.R. Robin

    Digital storytelling: a powerful technology tool for the 21st century classroom

    Theory Pract

    (2008)
  • B. Robin

    The educational uses of digital storytelling

    Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference

    (2006)
  • W. Allen Moore et al.

    Effects of video podcasting on psychomotor and cognitive performance, attitudes and study behaviour of student physical therapists

    Innovations in Education and Teaching International

    (2012)
  • S. Dash et al.

    Audio–visual aid in teaching fatty liver

    Biochem Mol Biol Educ

    (2016)
  • P.P. Pilarski et al.

    From music to macromolecules: using rich media/podcast lecture recordings to enhance the preclinical educational experience

    Med Teach

    (2008)
  • J. Egger et al.

    HTC Vive mevislab integration via openvr for medical applications

    PLoS ONE

    (2017)
  • S.L. Goldberg et al.

    Training dismounted combatants in virtual environments

    Tech. Rep.

    (2003)
  • S.A. Lloyd et al.

    Screencast tutorials enhance student learning of statistics

    Teaching of Psychology

    (2012)
  • Y.-K. Chiu et al.

    Cinematography tutorials in virtual reality

    ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Posters

    (2017)
  • C.J. Brame

    Effective educational videos: principles and guidelines for maximizing student learning from video content

    CBE Life Sci Educ

    (2016)
  • J. Lambert

    Digital storytelling cookbook

    (2010)
  • B. Lee et al.

    More than telling a story: transforming data into visually shared stories

    IEEE Comput Graph Appl

    (2015)
  • G. Riva et al.

    Affective interactions using virtual reality: the link between presence and emotions

    CyberPsychology & Behavior

    (2007)
  • C.Y. Wang et al.

    VR-Replay: Capturing and replaying avatars in VR for asynchronous 3D collaborative design

    2019 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR)

    (2019)
  • L. Freina et al.

    A literature review on immersive virtual reality in education: state of the art and perspectives

    The International Scientific Conference eLearning and Software for Education

    (2015)
  • J. Martín-Gutiérrez et al.

    Virtual technologies trends in education

    EURASIA Journal of Mathematics Science and Technology Education

    (2017)
  • A. Brown et al.

    Virtual reality: low-cost tools and resources for the classroom

    TechTrends

    (2016)
  • A.B. Craig et al.

    Developing virtual reality applications: foundations of effective design

    (2009)
  • P. Saalfeld et al.

    Student and Teacher Meet in a Shared Virtual Reality: A one-on-one Tutoring System for Anatomy Education

  • C. Greenhalgh et al.

    Applications of temporal links: recording and replaying virtual environments

    Proceedings IEEE Virtual Reality 2002

    (2002)
  • M. Morozov et al.

    vAcademia – educational virtual world with 3D recording

    2012 International Conference on Cyberworlds

    (2012)
  • Viar360. 2021. https://www.viar360.com/, online...
  • CenarioVR. 2021. https://www.cenariovr.com/, online...
  • M. Speicher et al.

    Exploring visual guidance in 360-degree videos

    Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for TV and Online Video

    (2019)
  • A. Serrano et al.

    Movie editing and cognitive event segmentation in virtual reality video

    ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)

    (2017)
  • Autodesk Maya. 2021. https://www.autodesk.com/products/maya/overview, online...
  • Cited by (0)

    View full text