Automatic guidance tools for enhancing the educative experience in non-immersive virtual worlds: Preliminary results from project V-LeaF

The interest of the Education community for Virtual Reality (VR) technologies has increased in the last few years due to their attractive 3D immersive worlds and facilities to provide a good environment to develop educational and collaborative tasks. However, these technologies present three main drawbacks: (1) a high cost in terms of hardware and infrastructure, (2) a high level of technology knowledge, and usually programming skills, is required to build up an educational and functional platform, and (3) once the educational platform is available for use, the educators are limited to the functionalities provided by the platform used. Our previous experience, designing and deploying a VR educational platform, named V-LeaF, showed that non immersive platforms (close to the gaming 3D platforms) provide High School educators and students with an attractive environment in which many features of the teaching/learning experience can be explored. However, this technological strength appears as a potential weakness feature of our platform when is used by high school students. Serious problems to maintain the student attention in this kind of domains have been detected, so the educators must employ time and dedication to ensure that students are really attending and acquiring the educational concepts scheduled. In this paper we describe an initial set of software tools developed (for both teachers and students) to solve the previous problem. An eye-gaze monitorization device allows teachers to focus the students' attention. A forms-based recommender system allows students to guide teacher's activity.