Teaching in Virtual Reality

In my work, I identified several opportunities for improvement of the application eDive. While some of these opportunities are specific to eDive, others could be generalized to other educational applications.

Each opportunity area emerges from one or more of the research methods: user interviews with teachers, internal stakeholder interviews, or heuristic evaluation. During the data synthesis, I gathered my research notes and clustered them by similar topics:

From the topics, I derived nine areas of the eDive application that could be improved, and I created Point-of-View statements that reflect the teachers' comments:

Lobby—the First Touchpoint with the Platform. The current lobby of the application didn't meet the standards of a modern interface. In addition, it violated several usability heuristics.

Onboarding Students to Virtual Reality. Teachers need to explain to the students how to work with the controllers because the students have little prior experience with VR, and the platform does not explain it. When the students struggle with technology, it limits their learning capabilities during the lesson.

Environment Design. Teachers prefer fun and colorful environments because they feel like fun environments make the lesson more interesting and that dark, monochrome environments can be depressing to the students.

Realistic or Simplified Avatars. Some teachers prefer customizable realistic avatars because they make it easier for them to distinguish between the students. Other teachers prefer simplified avatars because they lower the chance of personal bias.

Managing Students. Teachers need to keep track of student involvement because some students tend to speak less than others, and it can be difficult to involve everyone equally, especially in a large group. Teachers need an efficient way to divide students into groups so that they can monitor all the groups and the groups do not distract each other.

Speaking Activities. Users of collaborative virtual reality need to recognize when another user starts speaking because they expect virtual reality to simulate the flow of a real-life conversation, and in real conversations, people can see each other’s lips moving and hear the voice coming out of their mouths.

Taking Notes and Writing during Lesson. English teachers think it would be useful to take notes or write vocabulary during the lesson, but they fear it would take too much time and be difficult to learn.

Teacher’s Custom Content. Teachers need to use their own notes during the lesson because they follow a specific lesson plan with sometimes complex activities, and each teacher has a different level of teaching experience and a specific teaching style, so they prefer to have their personal notes. Teachers want to add their own educational content (presentations) because each teacher has a specific teaching style, and they sometimes need to adjust the predefined teaching materials.

Stress, Time Pressure, and Cognitive Overload. Beginner teachers feel overloaded because they need to focus on their teaching methods as well as working with the technology. Teachers need efficient tools that will not take up much time during the lesson because they need to focus on the students and the teaching itself and the lesson is too short to spend time on complex tools.

Fancy more detail and interview quotations? 👀 See the 5th chapter in my thesis.

Prototyping

This layout could readily fit the required functionality in each step of the user flow. Essentially, the central screen would serve for the main interaction, while the narrow side screen would show the user’s avatar with its settings.

I considered several designs of the quick menu. The first design (above) is inspired by Gravity Sketch (gesture-activated menu), the second by AltspaceVR (HUD menu). The latter two designs are based on a radial menu, which the user opens by pressing a button on the controller (B/Y button or the thumbstick).

In the next iteration, I continued with the latter two designs, because they better complied with the accessibility requirements—we wanted to adjust eDive for one-handed interaction.

The interface adapts to its content: while the settings only include a few controls that can fit on one compact screen, the private notes require a larger reading space, and so the interface modularly extends.

The visual style of the body-locked UI matches the high-fidelity prototype of the lobby screen. The two parts of the UI use the same color palette, font, icon set, and other visual elements.

If you made it down to this point… Thank you for reading! 🤗 Or scrolling, at least. Next, you can check out the actual thesis.

Any remarks? 💡 I’d be delighted to discuss my workflow, XR design tools, the future of education, life, universe, and everything! Reach me at LinkedIn or via email.