Educational virtual reality (VR) applications are the most recent addition to the learning management tools in this modern age. Due to health concerns, financial concerns, and convenience, people are looking for alternate ways to teach and learn. An efficient VR-based teaching interface could enhance student engagement, learning outcomes, and overall educational experience. Typically, teachers in a VR classroom do not have a way to know what students are doing since students are not visible. An efficient teaching interface should include some mechanism for a teacher to monitor students and alert the teacher if a student is trying to catch the attention of the teacher. An ideal interface would be one, which helps a teacher effectively monitor students while teaching without increasing the cognitive load of the teacher. In this paper, we present a comparative study of two such student monitoring interfaces. In the first interface, the student activity related information is shown using icons near the student avatar (representing a student in the VR environment). While in the second interface, a set of centrally-arranged emoticon-like visual indicators are present in addition to the student avatar, and the student activity related information is shown near the student emoticon. We present a detailed user experiment comparing the two interfaces in terms of teaching management, student monitoring capability, cognitive load, and user preference. Participants preferred and performed better with Indicator-located interface over avatar-located interface.

We assess the effectiveness of attention guidance cues in an educational platform in local high schools with real students. Three eye-tracked visual cues, previously assessed for their ability to guide and restore attention, are compared against a baseline absence of cue in a VR field trip of a virtual solar energy field. Students experienced four presentations on solar energy production including in-world animations and teacher imagery, in three of which the visual cues guided attention to the relevant object or teacher in the scene. Attention guidance using visual cues is commonly studied using “search and selection” style tasks, but has not been studied in the context of maintaining attention in real-world environments.

Virtual Reality (VR) headsets with embedded eye trackers are appearing as consumer devices (e.g. HTC Vive Eye, FOVE). These devices could be used in VR-based education (e.g., a virtual lab, a virtual field trip) in which a live teacher guides a group of students. The eye tracking could enable better insights into students’ activities and behavior patterns. For real-time insight, a teacher’s VR environment can display student eye gaze. These visualizations would help identify students who are confused/distracted, and the teacher could better guide them to focus on important objects. We present six gaze visualization techniques for a VR-embedded teacher’s view, and we present a user study to compare these techniques. The results suggest that a short particle trail representing eye trajectory is promising. In contrast, 3D heatmaps (an adaptation of traditional 2D heatmaps) for visualizing gaze over a short time span are problematic.