Abstract:

The art and craft of recording video lectures have been highly established and refined, as well as how and for what we should use it. I have myself recorded four sets of lectures and workshops for as many different courses, mostly for flipped classroom, all in all over twenty hours of lectures. I have also been Studio Director for Kuggen Medialab at Chalmers University of Technology for 10 years, helping other teachers to record, and planned a dozen of the universities video studios.

During 2020 and 2021 I have started to record lecture videos in a completely different way, in virtual reality instead. In this paper I will report on experiences and conclusions concerning this approach. Virtual reality (VR) is a technology were the user wears a VR headset covering the eyes, and other hardware such as hand controllers, and the illusion is that the user experience being surrounded by an immersive, interactive virtual world. You the user are visible inside the environment as an avatar, a virtual human. What happens in this VR environment can be recorded.

There are many different procedures, but the following three are the ones we have evaluated.
- Position a virtual camera, and then give your lecture in front of this, with your slide deck or other content (such as 3d models) displayed behind you. This is easy to do on your own. The end result is a 2d video showing the view of your avatar and the environment
- Collaborate, so that one person gives the lecture, and the other act as a “camera operator” inside VR. The end result is quite similar to the first alternative but being able to move the camera (and also have additional cameras) opens up for more varied editing.
- Record the VR experience itself, for example in the social VR platform EngageVR. When the recording is done in this way, and it replayed by the learner/viewer by having them wear VR headsets, and enter the virtual environment. They can then walk around in the recording, as if they were ghosts watching an event being played out before them.

Why would anyone prefer a VR recording instead of a video recording? The big difference is that the lecturer is seen as an avatar and not as a human, and that impossible things can be displayed such as having interactive 3d models visualize what you are talking about. Feedback on our lecture recordings, as well as literature on users preferences regarding avatar realism, suggest that learners/viewers are highly divided in their preferences. Many are critical against the lack of seeing the presenters face, and thus missing out on both an emotional connection and parts of their body language and facial expressions. Others find the VR lecture to be different, engaging and simply “fun”. There is an interesting connection to be made to Vtubers, that is, YouTube influencers that choose to present as avatars and not via video.

Recording a lecture in VR is very casual: I have literally done in barefoot several times. But it is also time consuming to learn how to set up and every time you prepare a recording. We definitely don’t recommend it for everyone. But we believe it can be a useful tool in the toolbox for when you want to try something different.

Keywords:

Lecture capture, virtual reality, recording, lecture.