An Interface for Enhanced Teacher Awareness of Student Actions and Attention in a VR Classroom

Networked VR is gaining recognition as a way to provide remote presentations or classes when in-person meetings are difficult or risky to conduct. However, the tools do not provide as many cues about audience actions and attention as in-person meetings, for example, subtle face and body motion cues are missing. Furthermore, the field of view and visual detail are reduced, and there are added problems such as motion sickness, network disconnections, and relatively unrestricted avatar positioning. To help teachers understand and manage students in such an environment, we designed an interface to support teacher awareness of students and their actions, attention, and temperament in a social VR environment. This paper focuses on how different visual cues are integrated into an immersive VR interface that keeps relevant information about students within the teacher’s visual field of attention. Cues include floating indicators, centrally-arranged face icons with gaze information, tethers and other indicators of avatar location, and options to reduce the amount of presented information. We include a pilot study of user preferences for different cue types and their parameters (such as indicator style and placement with respect to the teacher).