With the emergence of different types of Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs), researchers and educators must make informed decisions on what HMDs best support their needs. When performing experiments with relatively large populations, these decisions are largely affected by the sensing-scaling tradeoff between high-end tethered HMDs and lower-end standalone systems. Higher sensing affords a richer experience, but it is also associated with higher costs in terms of the HMD itself and the need for VR-ready computers. These limitations often impede instructors from using high-end HMDs in an efficient way with larger populations. We report on the results of a study in the context of place-based immersive VR (iVR) Geoscience education that compares the experiences and learning of 45 students after going through an immersive virtual field trip, using either a lower-sensing but scalable Oculus Quest or a higher-sensing but tethered HTC Vive Pro. Our results indicate that students who used the Quest reported significantly higher levels of satisfaction but also more simulator sickness (although still a very low number on average) compared to those who used an HTC Vive Pro. Our findings suggest that with content design considerations, standalone HMDs can be a viable replacement for high-end systems in large-scale studies. Furthermore, our results also suggest that in the context of place-based iVR education, the spatial abilities of students (i.e., sense-of-direction) can be a determining factor in their experiences and learning, and therefore an important topic of study for designing effective place-based iVR experiences.

Place-based and fieldwork learning play a key role in higher education in environmental sciences and other geospatial disciplines. We report on a study in which we evaluated a web-based virtual tour application for teaching natural resource management in fire-prone western forests in two undergraduate classes. The virtual tour uses 360°-image-based virtual scenes and pre-recorded audio commentary by a domain expert to lead participants through the Stanislaus-Tuolumne Experimental Forest where forest treatments were implemented to reduce fire hazard. We present results from assessing students' overall perception of the virtual tour, their views towards its application in undergraduate education, and their feedback for improving the design of future virtual tours. Furthermore, we discuss the collected data from the perspective of gender differences and differences in familiarity with the topic of the tour.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has made the need for remote data collection more apparent than ever, progress has been slow in the virtual reality (VR) research community, and little is known about the quality of the data acquired from crowdsourced participants who own a head-mounted display (HMD), which we call crowdXR. To investigate this problem, we report on a VR spatial cognition experiment that was conducted both in-lab and out-of-lab. The in-lab study was administered as a traditional experiment with undergraduate students and dedicated VR equipment. The out-of-lab study was carried out remotely by recruiting HMD owners from VR-related research mailing lists, VR subreddits in Reddit, and crowdsourcing platforms. Demographic comparisons show that our out-of-lab sample was older, included more males, and had a higher sense of direction than our in-lab sample. The results of the involved spatial memory tasks indicate that the reliability of the data from out-of-lab participants was as good as or better than their in-lab counterparts. Additionally, the data for testing our research hypotheses were comparable between in- and out-of-lab studies. We conclude that crowdsourcing is a feasible and effective alternative to the use of university participant pools for collecting survey and performance data for VR research, despite potential design issues that may affect the generalizability of study results. We discuss the implications and future directions of running VR studies outside the laboratory and provide a set of practical recommendations.

In this paper, we take a first step in exploring the effect of xR devices on the experiences of users in the context of human-agent interactions. We report on the design and heuristic evaluation of an embodied conversational agent integrated into either a Virtual or Mixed Reality environment. Our evaluation with four experts show that Virtual Reality may elicit a better experience from users, while Mixed Reality may evoke a better sense of social presence due to natural user embodiment and spatial references to physical objects in the real environment.

Mechanisms for guiding a user’s visual attention to a particular point of interest play a crucial role in areas such as collaborative VR and AR, cinematic VR, and automated or live guided tour experiences in xR-based education. The attention guiding mechanism serves as a communication tool that helps users find entities currently not visible in their view, referenced for instance by another user or in some accompanying audio commentary. We report on a user study in which we compared three different visual guiding mechanisms (arrow, butterfly guide, and radar) in the context of 360° image-based educational VR tour applications of real-world sites. A fourth condition with no guidance tool available was added as a baseline. We investigate the question: How do the different approaches compare in terms of target finding performance and participants’ assessments of the experiences. While all three mechanisms were perceived as improvements over the no-guidance condition and resulted in significantly improved target finding times, the arrow mechanism stands out as the most generally accepted and favored approach, whereas the other two (butterfly guide and radar) received a more polarized assessment due to their specific strengths and drawbacks.

Field trips are a key component of learning in STEM disciplines such as geoscience to develop skills, integrate knowledge, and prepare students for lifelong learning. Given the reported success of technology-based learning and the prevalence of new forms of technology, especially with immersive virtual reality (iVR) entering the mainstream, virtual field trips (VFTs) are increasingly being considered as an effective form of teaching to either supplement or replace actual field trips (AFTs). However, little research has investigated the implications of VFTs in place-based STEM education, and empirical evidence is still limited about differences between students’ learning experiences and outcomes in VFTs experienced on desktop displays and field trips experienced in iVR. We report on a study that divided an introductory geoscience laboratory course into three groups with the first two groups experiencing a VFT either on desktop (dVFT) or in iVR (iVFT), while the third group went on an AFT. We compared subjective experiences (assessed via questionnaires) and objective learning outcomes for these groups. Our results suggest that, although students reported higher motivation and being more present in the iVFT group, they did not learn more compared to those in the dVFT group; both VFT groups yielded higher scores for learning experience and perceived learning outcomes than the actual field site visit. These findings demonstrate positive learning effects of VFTs relative to AFTs and provide evidence that geology VFTs need not be limited to iVR setups, which lead to considerable equipment costs and increased implementation complexity. Discussing the results, we reflect on the implications of our findings and point out future research directions.

xR has the potential to warp both space and time. We demonstrate this potential by designing a mixed reality application for mobile devices for the Penn State's Obelisk, a historic landmark on the main Penn State campus that artistically reveals the geological history of Pennsylvania. Our AR application allows for placing a model of the Obelisk on any surface, interacting with the individual stones to reveal their geological characteristics and location of excavation, and changing to an immersive VR experience of this location based on 360° imagery. Originally conceptualized as a teaching tool for the School of Mines, our xR application revives the Obelisk's long forgotten mission and allows educators to integrate it once more into the curriculum as well as creatively expand its potential.

Virtual field trips have been thought of and implemented for several decades. For the most part, these field trips were delivered through desktop computers and often as interactive but strictly two-dimensional experiences. The advent of immersive technologies for both creating content and experiencing places in three dimensions provides ample opportunities to move beyond the restrictions of two dimensional media. We propose here a framework we developed to assess immersive learning experiences, specifically immersive virtual field trips (iVFTs). We detail the foundations and provide insights into associated empirical evaluations.

In this article, we present the GeoCorpora corpus building framework and software tools as well as a geo-annotated Twitter corpus built with these tools to foster research and development in the areas of microblog/Twitter geoparsing and geographic information retrieval. The developed framework employs crowdsourcing and geovisual analytics to support the construction of large corpora of text in which the mentioned location entities are identified and geolocated to toponyms in existing geographical gazetteers. We describe how the approach has been applied to build a corpus of geo-annotated tweets that will be made freely available to the research community alongside this article to support the evaluation, comparison and training of geoparsers. Additionally, we report lessons learned related to corpus construction for geoparsing as well as insights about the notions of place and natural spatial language that we derive from application of the framework to building this corpus.

Formal models of spatial relations such as the 9-Intersection model or RCC-8 have become omnipresent in the spatial information sciences and play an important role to formulate constraints in many applications of spatial data processing. A fundamental problem in such applications is to adapt geometric data to satisfy certain relational constraints while minimizing the changes that need to be made to the data. We address the problem of adjusting geometric objects to meet the spatial relations from a qualitative spatial calculus, forming a bridge between the areas of qualitative spatial representation and reasoning (QSR) and of geometric adjustment using optimization approaches. In particular, we explore how constraint-based QSR techniques can be beneficially employed to improve the optimization process. We discuss three different ways in which QSR can be utilized and then focus on its application to reduce the complexity of the optimization problem in terms of variables and equations needed. We propose two constraint-based problem simplification algorithms and evaluate them experimentally. Our results demonstrate that exploiting QSR techniques indeed leads to a significant performance improvement.

Next to authoritative spatial representations stemming from surveying and cartography efforts, there have always been spatial representations produced by laypeople which often come in a non-georeferenced form, such as sketch maps or verbal descriptions. With the advent of volunteered geographic information the amount and accessibility of such information increased drastically. This results in issues of ambiguity (not knowing what is depicted) and trust (not knowing whether the provided information is correct). To process this kind of information, matching approaches for establishing the correct correspondences between multiple representations are needed. As typically only qualitative relations are preserved in sketched information, performing the matching on a qualitative level has been suggested, but efficient solutions that are able to handle the involved combinatorial explosion of matching hypotheses are still lacking. We address this problem by developing a matching approach that exploits qualitative spatial reasoning to prune the search space while performing a heuristic search through the tree of possible matching hypotheses. The developed approach is general in that it can be employed for different tasks and problem domains, such as data integration and retrieval. In a case-study we apply it to the task of matching a sketch map to a geo-referenced data set.

We propose an approach that propagates distance and orientation intervals to integrate imprecise local knowledge into survey knowledge. In the context of mobile robot exploration this propagation scheme can be used to reason about the positions of landmarks or other salient positions and thus can be utilized to generate hypotheses for cycles in the environment. We describe a path-based and mainly topological representation and navigation approach based on the generalized Voronoi graph and demonstrate how the propagation method can be applied in this context.