Technical SectionVRdeo: Creating engaging educational material for asynchronous student-teacher exchange using virtual reality
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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R1: The communication of the content should be asynchronous, not requiring the simultaneous presence of the tutor (story narrator) and students.
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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.
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