Teaching-focused rapid authoring of educational extended reality (eduXR) experiences
Shaun Bangay, Sophie McKenzie, Guy Wood-Bradley · Interactive Learning Environments · 2025
Virtual and augmented reality experiences provide for experiential and individualized learning. Creating such educational extended reality (eduXR) experiences requires teams with specialist skills to program interactive simulations and a significant investment of time, resources and technical knowledge. Existing XR authoring tools require that the teacher develop technical skills, create and configure content, or adapt their lesson to a predefined application template. This paper investigates how teachers can be empowered to create their own eduXR experiences by designing and evaluating a rapid authoring process that records teachers presenting an explanation while using a virtual reality headset. Digital stories captured within an XR-based multi-participant distributed recording studio generate a choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) eduXR experience. Testing of the prototype authoring system shows that this approach produces eduXR experiences efficiently, enables incremental development and iterative refinement based on analytics evidence, and supports synchronous and asynchronous collaborations between teachers. Lessons are prepared using a human-writable text representation and are exported as eduXR experiences across a range of platforms supporting gradual adoption of eduXR into classrooms. The resultant eduXR experiences provide interactive narrative content that supports the learning experience. A key contribution of this approach is the focus on educational goals during the authoring process rather than expertize in managing XR technologies and development processes.