Circuit World: A Multiplayer VE for Researching Engineering Learning
Joseph Rozell, Jacklin Hope Stonewall, Samual Vacura, Haylee Lawrence, Jarrett Loseke, Matthew Greiner, Nicholas Wilson, Riley Hogan, Madissen Lawrence, Emily Oldham, Stephen B. Gilbert, Ben Purdy, Hannah Wellik, Kennedy Cook, Angelica Jasper, Nick Fetty, Leilani Hammel, Carley Haus, Yash Vardhan, Kaitlyn Ouverson · 2021 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW) · 2021
Business travel leads to the consumption of large amounts of energy. Circuit World (CW), a Unity virtual environment, uses avatars and realistic simulations of electrical circuits to test the effectiveness of teaching complex engineering tasks without travel. To evaluate CW, a study compares how well participants learn to repair a circuit when trained face-to-face, via Zoom, and within CW wearing an HMD. After training and completion of a knowledge quiz, learners are given a circuit to repair by themselves using a non-immersive desktop version of CW. Participants repair it again two weeks later to test retention. Each study session involves three people: learner, trainer, and researcher. The learner and trainer control avatars and the researcher, invisible, observes over the learner's shoulder. Collected data includes task performance logs from CW, knowledge quiz scores, and, based on video recordings, eye gaze tracking, behavioral coding, and measures of facial synchrony between trainer and learner.