VRdeo: Creating engaging educational material for asynchronous student-teacher exchange using virtual reality

Abstract

Educational videos are traditional means of communicating scientific findings to a broader audience. Nowadays, they are also a very common medium in distant teaching. However, creating videos using the existing software tools can be very challenging for inexperienced users. Also, the student’s engagement in standard videos is often very limited as the experience and exploration of the presented phenomena is indirect and far from being interactive. To overcome this, we propose a novel tool, called VRdeo, for creating and presenting educational material that utilizes the advantages of virtual reality (VR). Each stage of the production is represented by an operating mode, where the user acts in a predefined role. VRdeo is a versatile platform that enables tutors to immerse into the virtual scene, explore 3D models of scientific data, and record a narrated story where the tutor is an active element, represented by a virtual avatar. The recording can be exported as a virtual scene. The observers (e.g., students) can then enter such a scene where they can move around and have several options for replaying and interacting with the tutor’s story. In cases when the observer cannot use a virtual reality device, VRdeo enables to generate a traditional 2D video as well. To evaluate VRdeo, we asked several experts in diverse fields for their feedback and conducted a user study with students, which gave us valuable information about its usefulness for both creating and consuming the narrated stories.