An Assistance System Framework for Virtual Reality Self-Service E-Learning Kiosks

Digital self-service kiosks are an essential element in various customer-oriented application areas such as self-check-ins at the airport, or self-ordering at fast-food restaurants. Be-sides, self-service kiosks are also used frequently for educational purposes, for example, to inform visitors at certain exhibits in museums. Furthermore, Virtual Reality (VR) technology has proven to be able to support learning experiences in such cases. However, being used unsupervised and by visitors novel to VR, the experience of these VR self-service E-learning kiosks can suffer greatly besides health- and safety-related challenges. In this paper, we explore the use of assistance systems to support users in the mentioned use-case. We propose a component-based assistance system design for VR. We divide the assistance functions within our system into direct and indirect assistance functions, depending on whether a user may actively trigger them or the functions trigger automatically based on given pre-conditions. We demonstrate the feasibility of our concepts by a reference implementation and discuss the limitations and possibilities of our resulted system. We show that our system meets the users' needs and can proactively support them before potential challenges occur.