Don't Walk Away! Virtual Safety Boundaries for Collaborative Virtual Reality Learning Environments
Raquel Cabrera Araya, Yanwen Chen, Edgar Rojas-Muñoz · 2023
This Work-in-Progress Research paper explores how to design and implement Collaborative Virtual Reality Learning Environments (CVRLE) taking Teacher-Student Dynamics (TSD) into account. CVRLEs engage students in a virtual representation of a learning space. However, they do not incorporate TSDs, which are key elements of in-person teaching. The current work explores how to recreate one specific TSD: the watchfulness teachers have over the students' location during a field trip. We propose and compare seamless approaches to recreate this TSD inside CVRLEs via virtual safety boundaries around the teacher. These boundaries keep students in proximity to their instructor as they explore the CVRLE. The current work explores five approaches: 1) an invisible wall (used as baseline), 2) sound-based feedback, 3) a virtual companion, 4) a translucent rope connected to the teacher and 5) a translucent dome mesh around the teacher. The approaches were validated by five middle school teachers, who provided feedback about them from an educator's point of view. The interviews highlighted the importance of subtle and simple approaches that provide a sense of freedom to the students and minimize cognitive load while maintaining the TSDs. Overall, the vision of this Work-in-Progress is to solidify CVRLEs into a plausible method to perform teaching and learning when co-presence between teacher and students cannot be guaranteed. The design guidelines from this project will inform the creation of future interactive CVRLEs.