Abstract:

The terms Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and applications with 360º cameras are nowadays becoming more popular and familiar with many people. These technologies are relatively new in the educational context and there are lots of ambiguity about the applicability as an alternative educational medium. The focus of this paper is evaluating the user experience of a VR System in education, not the concept design and the application development. However, for the sake of this study, we made a sample VR application to conduct the assessment of students’ feelings and emotions. To concentrate on the VR user experience and to avoid any ambiguity in the content, the application has to be simple and familiar to students. Our user study and usability test reveal that students were not pleased to use the application for more than 5-10 minutes and the majority complain about dizziness. Finally based on our results we provide recommendation and suggestion for the potential use of VR in education. This paper would help educational institutions in designing their virtual courses.

VR based applications has been widely known recently (Martín-Gutiérrez, Mora, Añorbe-Díaz, & González-Marrero, 2017) and its use is implemented in various sectors and industries. Some of these applications focus mainly on improving the learning process, e.g. development of a real-time welding training system using virtual reality (Xie, Zhou, & Yu, 2015), or in constructional design which helps for instance in building lighting systems (Sampaio, Ferreira, Rosário, & Martins, 2010).

The application was mainly developed in Unity (version 2017.3.0p4), with scripts written using C#, and some Assets imported from Google VR SDK. The 360° background images used in the application were taken using Insta360 ONE camera.

In order to evaluate the user experience, the team decided to perform two separate types of test. To examine the emotional consequences of using the VR application, users were asked to describe what they were doing throughout the completion of the tasks, as well as how they felt and what emotions they had during and after the tests. To investigate the usability of the application, users were asked to complete three general tasks as quickly as they could and the time of completion per stage were recorded. Users were encouraged to think aloud while they were completing the tasks and were also asked about the ease of use and the intuitiveness of the interaction they had with the system.

Most notably, almost all users, with the exception of one who is an experienced VR gamer, reported feeling dizzy and nauseous citing the background being blurred and tilted as one of the contributing factors.

Keywords:

Virtual Reality, User Experience, Usability, Concept testing, VR for Education.