Abstract:

People's ability to orient themselves in unfamiliar spaces is relevant to targeted navigation. In newly designed classrooms or lecture halls with modern technologies, teachers often face the problem of finding their way around. Those responsible for the interior design of educational institutions often provide information about these spaces in the form of 2D descriptions (e.g. text combined with images and technical drawings) or as 360-degree walks on websites. In recent years, the use of these digital 360-degree walks has increased (e.g. Google Streetview), where users are presented with a virtual environment on a screen to explore a specific space. This medium is used to introduce new didactically innovative lecture halls in universities as well as in extracurricular education (e.g. museums or cultural institutions). Few attempts have been made to use eye-tracking to empirically investigate whether these 360-degree walks as a source of information about unfamiliar spaces can improve retention compared to 2D image-text combinations.

In this paper, we present a study with N=33 participants using mobile eye-trackers to test the following hypothesis: 360-degree walks are a more effective information media than 2D text-image combinations for teachers to inform themselves about unfamiliar classrooms or lecture halls. The effectiveness of the two information media is assessed in this study by analyzing the retrieval process (remembering) during a retention test. In addition to the correct recognition of the objects, the retention test also includes the time required, including an analysis of the gaze of the eye tracker.

Our results show that there are no significant differences in the recall of correct objects, in the search times and in the search history. The hypothesis can therefore be rejected. Thus, 360-degree walks are a novel way to inform teachers about classrooms or lecture halls, but in our study they showed no advantage or disadvantage compared to static 2D images with textual descriptions. Furthermore, we found that there was a correlation between the self-assessed media literacy of the subjects with a 360-degree walk and the results of the retention test. A possible reason for this could be that the use of 360-degree walks as an information medium is unfamiliar to the test subjects and that media literate test subjects were able to use it in a more targeted manner.

Keywords:

Interactive learning environments, Eye-Tracking, 360-degree walks.