Immersive and Collaborative Classroom Experiences in Virtual Reality

In these early days of educational Virtual Reality (VR) applications, it is critical to establish best practices for exploring the subtle relationship between experiences in VR and learning. In contrast to typical user studies, the evaluation of a VR experience offered by a prototype can be subject to the intermittent breaking of an illusion; something users tend not to recover from. Our work proposes a set of metrics related to presence, immersion and flow, and considers them in the context of two case studies. First, the results of a 60 user exploratory study reveal the need to not only modify the proposed metrics, but to innovate in terms of collaborative experiences. Second, key ways to introduce cost-effective collaboration mechanisms into educational VR experiences are introduced. Both of these studies are the result of ongoing work with the Royal BC Museum.