VisTA-LIVE: A Visualization Tool for Assessment of Laboratories in Virtual Environments

A Virtual Reality Laboratory (VR Lab) experiment refers to an experiment session that is being conducted in the virtual environment through Virtual Reality (VR) and aims to deliver procedural knowledge to students similar to that in a physical lab environment. While VR Lab is becoming more popular among education institutes as a learning tool for students, existing designs are mostly considered from a student's perspective. Instructors could only receive limited information on how the students are performing and could not provide useful feedback to aid the students' learning and evaluate their performance. This motivated us to create VisTA-LIVE: a Visualization Tool for Assessment of Laboratories In Virtual Environments. In this paper, we present in detail the design thinking approach that was applied to create VisTA-LIVE. The tool is deployed in an Extended Reality (XR) environment, and we report the evaluation results with domain experts and discuss issues related to monitoring and assessing a live VR lab session which lay potential directions for future work. We also describe how the resulting design of the tool could be used as a reference for other education developers who wish to develop similar applications.