The adoption of virtual laboratories has seen significant growth, particularly within tertiary education, driven by the increasing need for flexible, accessible, and scalable learning environments. A significant development in this area is the integration of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies, leading to the emergence of VR Labs, which offer immersive, interactive simulations that enhance experiential learning. Recognizing the potential of these VR Labs to transform education, several Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have begun incorporating them as part of the course content, providing students with hands-on experience that transcends geographical and physical limitations. Some of these VR Labs use avatar recordings to demonstrate lab procedures, but research on their design for effective learning and live learner monitoring remains limited. In this work, we examined how experiment complexity, equipment placement, and instructor avatar positioning affect learning in a VR Lab. By analyzing an existing avatar recording-based VR Lab, we designed an improved VR Lab by using the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test for COVID-19 in biomedical engineering as an example experiment. We conducted a user study with 10 users to evaluate the learning experience and gathered feedback on live monitoring and educational use of VR Labs from a learner's perspective. The findings are summarized as novel design guidelines for creating enhanced avatar recording-based VR Labs, focusing on the experiment steps, the equipment placement, the instructor avatar placement, a monitoring interface, and recommendations on utilizing VR Labs as a pedagogical tool in standalone experiences and a course component scenario.

A Virtual Reality Laboratory (VR Lab) experiment refers to an experiment session that is being conducted in the virtual environment through Virtual Reality (VR) and aims to deliver procedural knowledge to students similar to that in a physical lab environment. While VR Lab is becoming more popular among education institutes as a learning tool for students, existing designs are mostly considered from a student's perspective. Instructors could only receive limited information on how the students are performing and could not provide useful feedback to aid the students' learning and evaluate their performance. This motivated us to create VisTA-LIVE: a Visualization Tool for Assessment of Laboratories In Virtual Environments. In this article, we present in detail the design thinking approach that was applied to create VisTA-LIVE. The tool is deployed in an Extended Reality (XR) environment, and we report the evaluation results with domain experts and discuss issues related to monitoring and assessing a live VR lab session which lay potential directions for future work. We also describe how the resulting design of the tool could be used as a reference for other education developers who wish to develop similar applications.

Remote conferencing systems are increasingly used to supplement or even replace in-person teaching. However, prevailing conferencing systems restrict the teacher’s representation to a webcam live-stream, hamper the teacher’s use of body-language, and result in students’ decreased sense of co-presence and participation. While Virtual Reality (VR) systems may increase student engagement, the teacher may not have the time or expertise to conduct the lecture in VR. To address this issue and bridge the requirements between students and teachers, we have developed Tutor In-sight, a Mixed Reality (MR) avatar augmented into the student’s workspace based on four design requirements derived from the existing literature, namely: integrated virtual with physical space, improved teacher’s co-presence through avatar, direct attention with auto-generated body language, and usable workflow for teachers. Two user studies were conducted from the perspectives of students and teachers to determine the advantages of Tutor In-sight in comparison to two existing conferencing systems, Zoom (video-based) and Mozilla Hubs (VR-based). The participants of both studies favoured Tutor In-sight. Among others, this main finding indicates that Tutor In-sight satisfied the needs of both teachers and students. In addition, the participants’ feedback was used to empirically determine the four main teacher requirements and the four main student requirements in order to improve the future design of MR educational tools.

An immersive virtual laboratory (VL) could offer flexibility of time and space, as well as safety, for remote students to conduct laboratory activities through online experiential learning. Recording an instructor's demonstration inside a VL is an approach that allows students to learn directly from a demonstration. However, students have to learn from a recording while controlling the playback, which requires attention spent on additional spatial and temporal cues. This additional cognitive load could lead to errors during the laboratory procedure. To address these challenges, we have identified four design requirements to reduce attention load in VLs; namely, organized learning steps, improved student sense of co-presence, reduction of task-instructor split-attention, and learning independent of interpersonal distance. Based on these requirements, we have designed and implemented spatial-temporal assistive toolsets for laboratories in a virtual environment, namely XR-LIVE, to reduce cognitive load and enhance learning in an asynchronous shared-space demonstration, implemented based on the setup of a standard civil engineering laboratory. We also analyzed students' behavior in the VL demonstration to design guidelines applicable to generic VLs.

While virtual reality (VR) tools provide an immersive learning experience for students, it is difficult for an instructor to observe the students' learning activities in a virtual environment (VE). Thus, it hinders interactions that could occur between the instructor and students, which are usually required in a classroom environment to understand how each student learns. Previous work has added virtual awareness cues that can help a small group of students to collaborate in a VE. However, when the number of students increases, such virtual awareness cues can cause visual clutter and confuse the instructor. We propose ObserVAR, a visualization system that allows the instructor to observe students in a VE at scale. ObserVAR uses augmented reality techniques to visualize each student's gaze in a VE and improves the instructor's awareness of the entire class. The visualizations are then optimized to reduce visual clutter in the scene using a force-directed graph drawing algorithm. In designing ObserVAR, we first investigated visualizations that can provide the instructor with an overall awareness of the VE that can be scaled up as the number of users increases. Second, we optimized the visualization of students by leveraging a graph drawing algorithm to reduce the visual clutter in the class scene. We compared the performance of our prototype with some commercially available user interfaces for VE classrooms. In our study, ObserVAR has demonstrated improvement and flexibility in several application scenarios.

As an emerging technology, virtual reality (VR) has been used increasingly as a learning tool to explore “outside the classroom experiences” inside the classroom. While VR provides an immersive experience to the students, it is difficult for the instructor to monitor the students' activities in the VR. Thus, it hinders interactions between the instructor and students. To solve this challenge, we investigated a technique that allows the instructor to observe VR users at scale using Augmented Reality. Augmented Reality techniques are used to visualize the gazes of the VR users in the virtual environment, and improve the instructor's awareness.

Collaboration between a helper and a worker in a 3D collaborative virtual environment usually requires real-time information sharing, since the worker relies on the timely assistance from the helper. In contrast, collaboration between workers requires them to shift their attention between independent tasks and dependent tasks. In worker-worker collaborations, a real-time updating technique could create excess information, which may be a distraction. In this paper, we compare different information sharing techniques and determine an efficient technique for the collaboration between workers. In our user experiment, participants performed a floor plan design task in a designer and engineer pairing on a desktop VR environment. The results showed that the proposed information sharing technique, in which objects are updated based on local users' actions, is more suitable than real-time updates. In addition, we discuss design implications that can be applied to different collaborative scenarios.

The main objective of this research work is to create a desktop VR environment which enables users to interact naturally with virtual objects positioned both in front and behind the screen. We propose a mirror metaphor that simulates a physical stereoscopic screen with the properties of a mirror. In addition to allowing users to interact with virtual objects positioned in front of the stereoscopic screen using their virtual hands, the virtual hands can be transferred inside the virtual mirror to interact with objects behind the screen. When the virtual hands are operating inside the virtual mirror, they are transformed like the reflection in a real mirror. This effectively doubles the interactable space and creates an interactive space that could facilitate collaborative tasks. Our user study shows that users could interact through the mirror approach as effectively as similar interaction techniques, hence demonstrating that the mirror technique is a viable interface in certain VR setups.