Efe Bozkir: Hi, my name is Efe and I am a researcher from
University of Tübingen. Today I will present you our work
"Digital Transformations of Classrooms in Virtual Reality".
Our motivation is to create digital alternatives in
education and learning via virtual reality. Virtual reality
brings up a lot of advantages such as remote collaboration,
and possibility to study different classroom
manipulations which are difficult to generate in real
world due to technical problems or privacy issues. It is
important to understand visual behaviors and cognitive
processes of users in VR classrooms to further create
classrooms for different purposes. One effective way to
understand these is to analyze user eye movements. Therefore,
we designed a virtual classroom to study different classroom
manipulations in VR. We introduced a lecture about
computational thinking, which takes approximately 15 minutes
in a VR classroom, and we analyzed data from 288
participants whose ages range between 10 to 13. Our experiment
is in 2 x 2 x 4 between-subjects design. Participants sit in the
back or in the front. Virtual avatars in the environment,
which are peer-learners and teacher are rendered in cartoon
or realistic styles and peer-learners have different
hand-raising behaviors, meaning that 20%, 35%, 65%, or 80% of
the peers raise their hands when a question is asked. You can see
some screenshots from our environment. Back sitting
participants have three rows in front of them, whereas front
sitting participants have one row. Realistic-styled avatars
have thicker legs and arms compared to cartoon-styled
avatars, whereas cartoon-styled avatars have larger heads. Our
measurements were eye movement features including fixation
durations, number of fixations, saccade durations, amplitudes,
and pupil diameters. Fixations are the periods when eyes are
stationary within the head. On the other hand, saccades are the
fast eye movements that take gaze from one fixation to
another. Such features correspond to different visual
and cognitive processes. For example, a larger pupil diameter
corresponds to a higher cognitive load. On the other
hand, longer fixations might be related to engaging more with
the content or task difficulty. Larger saccade amplitudes are
related to shifting visual attention. We extracted
fixations when head and gaze velocities are below 7 degrees
per second, and 30 degrees per second, respectively,
considering their durations are between 100 and 500
milliseconds. We extracted saccades when gaze velocities
were higher than 60 degrees per second, considering their
durations are between 30 and 80 milliseconds. After applying
full factorial ANOVA, we found that mean fixation durations in
the back sitting condition were significantly longer than in the
front sitting condition. This indicates more processing time
for the back sitting participants. On the contrary,
saccade durations were shorter in the back condition. Front
sitting participants had larger saccade amplitudes, meaning that
they shifted their attention more due to narrower field of
view. We found that participants had longer fixation durations in
the cartoon-styled avatar condition, meaning that they
might have found cartoon-styled avatar condition more engaging.
Saccade durations were shorter in the cartoon-styled avatar
condition than in the realistic-styled avatar
condition. In addition, we found that pupil diameters in the
realistic-styled avatar condition were larger,
indicating a higher cognitive load. We found mixed effects in
the different hand-raising conditions. Pupil diameters were
larger in the 80% hand-raising condition than in the 35%
hand-raising condition. In addition, in the 65%
hand-raising condition, there were more fixations than in the
80% hand-raising condition. These showed that visual
behaviors are affected by the amount of hand raises, but such
effects should be further investigated. In conclusion, we
found that eye movements differentiate in different
classroom manipulations in virtual reality, which suggests
that participants had different visual behaviors and cognitive
processes. These effects should be considered when designing
immersive visual learning spaces. Thank you very much for
listening and if you have any questions, I will be happy to
answer them. Thank you.