ViLeArn
Overview
Our goal is to promote competencies and increase learning success with special consideration of availability, participation and inclusion. The project combines innovative media-didactic principles of classroom teaching and learning as an interactive and collaborative process using digital media with current techniques of virtual and augmented reality. Teachers and learners interact live in hybrid avatar-agents teaching-learning scenarios. Embodied by virtual avatars, participants enter a social interaction during the teaching-learning process and thereby use the whole range of socially effective signals, especially for attention control, positive reinforcement and a sense of belonging. Agent technology supports teachers and learners by simulating positive behaviours. Digital media (image, sound, video, web) are seamlessly embedded into virtual learning environments. Thus ViLeArn integrates digital media as the focus of competence development with VR technologies as didactic tools and combines the advantages of distributed learning with the advantages of classroom teaching. ViLeArn researches and develops the necessary basic technologies in close interdisciplinary cooperation between media didactics, human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer science and with continuous accompanying empirical usability and effectiveness tests.
Please find more information on our project homepage.
Virtual Seminars
In our seminars, participants are equipped with a VR-enabled laptop and a VR headset, either at home or in their offices. After installing our application, they attend the seminar virtually. To enable visual anonymity, participants can be embodied as robots.
Highlighted Features
Interactive Tutorial
Participants start in a private room and can familiarize themselves with application features in an interactive tutorial. After that, they are ready to meet other people in a shared seminar session.
Virtual Tablet
Every user has their own tablet, consisting of a web browser, keyboard, voice memo, and scene controls to e.g., share their screen, switch the virtual room (main room and breakout rooms).
The tablets user interface works both like a touchscreen: content can be clicked and dragged with virtual finger or stylus, and can be interacted with from afar: interface can be pointed at, clicking and scrolling via pressing respective controller buttons.
Benchmarking of the technical system
In 2019, we investigated performance and user experience of our technical system. More informations can be found in our publication Not Alone Here?! Scalability and User Experience of Embodied Ambient Crowds in Distributed Social Virtual Reality. The video shows embodied social interactions of two persons sorting planets of our solar system.
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